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Borderlines
Postmodern Studies 33
Series
edited by
Theo Dhaen
and
Hans Bertens
Borderlines
Autobiography and Fiction
in Postmodern Life Writing
Gunnthrunn Gudmundsdttir
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence.
ISBN: 90-420-1145-9
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam New York, NY 2003
Printed in The Netherlands
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for his

invaluable support and encouragement. Many thanks for their
insightful comments and suggestions go to Nicholas White, John
O'Brien, Johnnie Gratton, Laura Marcus, lfhildur Dagsdttir, Orri
Vsteinsson, Halldr Gumundsson and Patrick Crowley. I am also
grateful to Thomas Munch-Petersen for giving me the opportunity to
develop this material in teaching. A special thanks for inspiration and
companionship go to Emma Kemp and Svanhildur skarsdttir. And,
of course, as ever, to without whom... rbrn Halldrsdttir,
Gumundur Georgsson and Dagur Gunnarsson.
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Contents
Introduction: Autobiography and Fiction 1
1 Memory and the Autobiographical Process

Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster 11
2 The Use of Narrative in Autobiography

Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski 57
3 Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing

Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal 97
4 Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures

Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori 141
5 Biography in Autobiography 183
6 Photographs in Autobiography 221
Conclusion: Postmodernism and Borderlines 263
Bibliography 275
Index 291
Introduction
Autobiography and Fiction
The field of contemporary life-writing offers many avenues for

exploration. In the last thirty years or so, theoretical writing on
autobiography has blossomed, autobiographies written from a
specifically female perspective or from the perspective of members of
ethnic minorities have proliferated, and the genre, or - as we shall see
- cluster of genres and sub-genres, has been a fertile ground for
experimental writing. The reasons for this interest in life-writing are
many and varied, but one important factor is that autobiography - in
its various guises - can capture and address many contemporary
concerns, for example the status of the subject, the relations and
representations of ethnicity and gender, and perhaps most importantly
questions the individual's relationship with the past. Autobiographical
writing can thereby reflect some of the main preoccupations of
postmodernism,1 which has often been defined in terms of questions
about our knowledge of the past and the difficulty of articulating our
relationship to it.2 Such issues abound in recent life-writing.
Postmodernism has also been described as a pluralistic art which
'blurs the boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' culture, as well as
between art and every-day experience'.3 This work concentrates
specifically on the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in
1 See for instance Leigh Gilmore's discussion where she sees

postmodernism as being the perfect mode to 'free' autobiographical
discourse in 'The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography,
and Genre', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley,
Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1994), pp. 3-21. But note also Michael Sheringham's review of
Autobiography and Postmodernism where he explains that some of the
qualities Gilmore finds in postmodern autobiographies are intrinsic to
autobiography itself in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997)
472-478.
2 See for instance Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History,
Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).
3 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell,
1996), p. vii.
2 Borderlines
postmodernist life-writing. The aim is to see how by demarcating and

investigating these borderlines we can come to a better understanding
of the role of fiction in autobiography, and this can then enable us to
examine the representation of the past in current life-writing. It is not
my aim here to pinpoint one definitive border between autobiography
and fiction,4 rather I attempt to outline various areas where
autobiography and fiction interact in a number of key texts.
The term autobiography in this work is used to denote any text
which is clearly published as such, whether through its title or subtitle,
or through the way its status as non-fiction is indicated by the
circumstances or manner of its publication and presentation. In most
cases this entails that the texts have the same author, narrator and
subject, thereby following Philippe Lejeune's definition,5 which
excludes autobiographical novels. But my definition is also wider than
Lejeune's, as I include not only: 'Rcit[s] rtrospectif[s] en prose
qu'une personne relle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu'elle met
l'accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sa
personnalit',6 but also texts where the author writes on the life of his
or her parent(s), as these types of text constitute a large part of current
life writing.7 The vogue for memoirs and non-fiction, so apparent in
recent years - especially in Britain, has meant that this kind of text is
widely published and discussed as part of autobiographical writing. I
4 Suzanne Gearhart has questioned the existence of fixed borders between

history and fiction, and maintains they are always in some ways fluid. See
especially her introduction to The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A
Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
5 See Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique: Nouvelle dition
augmente (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1996), pp. 27-28.
6 Ibid., p. 14. 'A retrospective prose narrative by a real person on his own
life, with emphasis on his individuality, in particular a story of his
personality.'
7 As in the tradition of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907). Many such
'memoirs' have been published in Britain for instance in recent years, for
example Blake Morrison, And when did you last see your father? (1993),
Tim Lott, The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), Susan Wicks, Driving My Father
(1995) and Linda Grant, Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998).
Autobiography and Fiction 3
would maintain that these texts must also always be to a large extent
autobiographical and therefore of relevance to our enquiry.
Generic differences and questions about the definition of the genre
of autobiography are inevitably constant preoccupations for anyone
writing on autobiography. I work in this study from the premise that
there are generic differences between autobiography and the novel.
This has, of course, been contested, most notably by Paul de Man,8 but
I would hold with Ann Jefferson when she argues that it is necessary:
to presuppose that there are generic distinctions between

novels and autobiographies, even while the fiction is being
revealed as autobiographical and the autobiographies as
fictional, since in this sphere (if not in all others) generic
differences need to be respected as an effect of reading,
even if they cannot be defined as intrinsic qualities of the
texts in question.9
In accordance with this view I specifically examine the relationship

between autobiography and fiction in autobiographical works, but do
not attempt to extract the autobiographical from works of fiction.
From Philippe Lejeune's Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) onwards,
a strand runs through autobiographical theory which claims that there
is a difference between autobiography and the novel, and that this
difference lies in the referentiality of autobiography, as Paul de Man's
assertions in 'Autobiography As De-Facement' have been rigorously
refuted.10 Autobiography is, therefore, considered here as a referential
art, without denying the complexities involved in that referentiality.
8 See Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement' in The Rhetoric of

Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 67-81.
9 Ann Jefferson, 'Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute, Robbe-
Grillet', in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, eds. Judith Still and
Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 108-
129, p. 109.
10 Michael Sheringham claims that: 'To eliminate the question of literal truth
and reference in autobiography is to pay insufficient heed to a difference
perceptible to most readers and which conditions different kinds of reading.'
French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec (Oxford:
4 Borderlines
The question of fictionality is a constant preoccupation throughout

this work. The word 'fictional' is used here to designate conventions
and practices one associates with creative writing - such as structure,
poetic or literary descriptions of people and places, ordering of events
to create certain effects - rather than simply things that are 'made-up'.
This follows Johnnie Gratton's view:
The non-existence of my life story also makes it necessary

for me to produce 'fiction' in a good sense: fiction as
making and not just making up; fiction as the corollary of
imagination, fantasy and desire; fiction as the supplement
of memory (a supplement probably always already in
memory). In short, fiction is coextensive with the idea of a
performative dimension. It affirms the increasingly
highlighted 'act-value' of autobiographical writing at the
expense of its traditionally supposed 'truth-value'.11
I consider here fictionality to be a necessary part of the

autobiographical process itself and not something external to it, or
incompatible with it. It is not my aim to enter into any simplistic 'fact'
versus 'fiction' debate, but rather to examine how autobiographers
Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 18. And Paul John Eakin points out that 'the
critic's concern with reference, with the author and his intention, is built into
the very structure of autobiography considered as a figure of reading.'
'Philippe Lejeune and the Study of Autobiography', Romance Studies 8
(1986) 1-14 (p. 11). Reference in autobiography is Paul John Eakin's main
theme in his two books, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-
Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Touching the
World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992). He not only examines biographical reference, but also historical,
social, and cultural reference. What brings him to this subject is the basic
assumption that what differentiates autobiography from the novel is exactly
this question of truth and reference. See also John Sturrock, The Language of
Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
11 Johnnie Gratton, 'Postmodern French Fiction: Practice and Theory', in
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the present,
ed. Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.
242-260, p. 253.
negotiate the borders and boundaries between autobiography and

fiction. This type of negotiation, I maintain, is especially apparent in
any autobiographical text where the autobiographer deals actively
with the problematics of the writing process itself. Life-writing can be
said always to contain both autobiographical and fictional aspects, but
an awareness of the problematics involved means the writer has
constantly to negotiate the way in which the autobiographical and the
fictional aspects of the writing process interact in the text.
In discussing how one critic of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984)
wanted to emphasise the text's literary quality over its referential
aspects while continually referring back to Duras's own comments on
the text, (thereby at once removing the author from the text and
reinstating the author's presence), Leah D. Hewitt points out:
What surfaces in this paradox is autobiography's slippery

relation to distinct conceptual models - traditional and
modern - as it stirs its mixtures of literature in life and life
in literature, making it difficult to keep the 'purely' literary
and the 'purely' referential in their 'proper' (opposed) places.
Autobiography, particularly in the postmodern era, balances
precariously on the mobile borderline between opposing
conceptions of literature.12
Autobiographical writing clearly invites this kind of confusion and

hence there is no intention here to differentiate between the 'purely'
literary and 'purely' referential, rather to attempt to identify aspects of
the fictional within the autobiographical. Fictionality here, therefore,
12 Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 1. Robert Smith explains that: 'there appear to be
three enclosures within the field of autobiographical theory: 1. Theories and
surveys of the theory [. . .] showing perhaps the tendency of much recent
work on autobiography to cancel out both itself and its subject. 2. Suspicions
as to whether autobiography can be theorised as a genre since as Candace
Lang points out, it seems to get everywhere, like sand. 3. Positivist
definitions of autobiography, merging with quasi-existentialist claims about
self-knowledge.' Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 55-56.
6 Borderlines
can denote not only conventions in creative writing but also

conventions deployed in autobiographical writing.
Autobiographies can, for instance, create the illusion that we are
present to something that happened earlier. This happens for instance
when autobiographers attempt to write from the viewpoint of the past,
as for instance Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes (1996). This method
implies fictionality, as we can never speak authoritatively from the
past, and it highlights the problem of the representation of the past, as
the past is always in one way or another already mediated.
Autobiographers often attempt to retrieve a sense of the past, and the
method they choose for that retrieval can involve a degree of
fictionality.
Fiction also plays a part in the dichotomy between the universal and
the individual always present in autobiographies. As the individual
autobiographer writes on universal experiences, such as mother-
daughter relationships, experiences of crossing cultures, or the death
of a parent, he or she has to deal with the universal structure of these
experiences. Universal structures necessarily contain a component
deriving from conventions of representation, so they are in some sense
always already 'made-up'. When many texts follow similar patterns in
relating such experiences this invites questions about the role of the
public versus the private, about how individual experiences fit in with
universal structures. Autobiography is, of course, always about stating
an individuality while at the same time making it public, thereby
giving individual experiences universal connotations.
The approach I have chosen in this work allows me to address many
issues, such as gender, cultural transplantation, memory, narrative, the
relationship between autobiography and biography, and the use of
photographs in autobiography. There is no attempt here to cover each
of these issues in full, rather continually to focus on how the
autobiographer constantly encounters borderlines between fiction and
autobiography when tackling these issues. I hope to throw light on the
role of these borderlines through close readings of key texts, while
also examining recent trends in autobiography theory. But the
traditional areas of study in literary theory, namely theme and genre,
will also have a place in my work, although they have a problematic
relationship with postmodern theory.13 The issue of genre has already

been touched upon, and themes - such as gender and crossing cultures
- are examined in terms of the fictional aspects at work within certain
thematic concerns in the genre of autobiography.
I bring together a number of texts from the last thirty years written in
English, French, and German. This study is, however, not based on
cultural comparisons, but aims at a broader understanding of recent
autobiographical writing. My contention is that autobiographies in the
West have followed similar patterns, whether they are written in
English, German, or French, and the autobiographers have to grapple
with similar concerns and ideas. I believe it, therefore, to be of value
to look at these texts together, without minimising the differences
between them, in order to establish a broad base from which to
examine the different ways in which autobiographers wrestle with the
borderlines between autobiography and fiction.
The choice of texts has been guided by a sense of the vital
importance of borders. I have, therefore, based my choice on texts that
experiment with autobiography, more than on any similarities such as
language. The authors discussed include the Austrian Peter Handke;
the British J. R. Ackerley and Jenny Diski; the Americans Paul
Auster, Lillian Hellman, James Ellroy and Suzannah Lessard; the
Canadians Michael Ondaatje and Eva Hoffman; the New Zealander
Janet Frame; and the French writers Marie Cardinal, Roland Barthes,
Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux. In choosing these texts I am not
claiming them to be directly representative of postmodernist
autobiographical writing, but rather contend that in one way or
13 Ralph Cohen explains why genre theory poses a problem in

postmodernism: 'Postmodern critics have sought to do without genre theory.
Terms like "text" and "criture" deliberately avoid generic classifications.
And the reasons for this are efforts to abolish hierarchies that genres
introduce, to avoid the assumed fixity of genres and the social as well as
literary authority such limits exert, to reject the social and subjective
elements in classification.' 'Do Postmodern Genres Exist?', in Postmodern
Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988),
pp. 11-27, p. 12.
8 Borderlines
another these texts negotiate the borderline between autobiography

and fiction in ways that reflect postmodernist tendencies.
Despite the fact that all the authors are literary figures - playwrights,
novelists, or critics - the texts cover a wide range of types of
autobiographical writing: from Peter Handke's short memoir of his
mother, to Janet Frame's three-volume account of her life from
childhood to the time of writing; from Michael Ondaatje's descriptions
of his travels in his home country, to Marie Cardinal's account of her
mental illness and treatment. The texts I have chosen are therefore not
all what one might call 'straight-forward' autobiographies, since some
of them have as their primary subject not the writer him- or herself but
his or her parents or parent. It could be said that my sample of texts is
not representative of mainstream or indeed popular autobiography, but
my task in this work is to look at what literary experimentation with
borders can bring to autobiographical writing.
Transgression is probably a good term to apply to these texts as they
straddle the borders between travel writing and autobiography (as in
Michael Ondaatje's case), biography and autobiography (where people
write on their parents such as Annie Ernaux and Paul Auster), and
different research methods, such as sociology, history, anthropology,
and psychoanalysis. These writers all in one way or another challenge
our perception of the role of fiction in autobiographical writing by
transgressing borders, thereby highlighting the existence of these
borders and questioning conventional modes of autobiographical
practice.
My work is divided into six main chapters. The first chapter studies
the role of memory in the autobiographical writings of Lillian
Hellman, Georges Perec, and Paul Auster. It examines how writing an
autobiography involves negotiation between the public and the
private, and between individual histories and history writ large. I also
investigate the other side of memory, i.e. forgetting, in order to look
more closely at the role fiction plays in the texts. Of interest here is
the treatment of memory and history, and manifestations of the
process of remembering in the texts and what these tell us about the
process of writing autobiography.
The questions I raise in the second chapter on narrative in

autobiography concern the way in which autobiographers organise
their memories, and how narrative structure affects the relationship
between autobiography and fiction in the works of Suzannah Lessard,
Peter Handke, and Jenny Diski. I examine the use of narrative
structure, that is how the ordering of events produces meaning, and
what the autobiographers' experiments with narrative structure tell us
about the role narrative plays in representing the past.
In the third chapter I explore the role of gender and its relationship
with personal mythologies. I examine how self-invention works
through narrative and structure in women's autobiographies. The
status of the autobiographical process is highlighted here as a means
of controlling, creating, and projecting an identity in the works of
Janet Frame and Marie Cardinal. Two themes are touched upon that
surface again and again in autobiographies by women writers:
becoming a writer and the relationship with their mother. I focus on
how the writers represent these two elements in their lives and the role
gender has in that representation.
In the fourth chapter I look at how autobiographers who describe
cultural crossings - Michael Ondaatje, Eva Hoffman, and Kyoko Mori
- can highlight the fictional elements of autobiography in their
awareness of two cultures, and two languages. I examine the structure
they use to represent their experiences, and the special importance of
their use of language. I look at how they use descriptions of landscape
to represent the difference between the old and the new world, and
their use of other genres, such as travel writing. I explore how their
unique problems can highlight the general in autobiography, that is the
struggle between the past and the present. The past in autobiography
is always to some extent an imaginary past, and this is even more
prominent when autobiographers are writing on a past in a different
country, a different culture.
The fifth chapter centres on the relationship between autobiography
and biography in texts where autobiographers write mainly on their
families, most often one parent. I explore the difference between
writing about oneself and writing one's autobiography via the
biography of a parent, or via a search for identity through exploration
10 Borderlines
of family history. The aim is to see what writing biography through

autobiography adds to the discussion of the borderline between
autobiography and fiction. In the first part of the chapter I look at
several writers who have written on their families, such as J. R.
Ackerley, Suzannah Lessard, James Ellroy, Margaret Forster, Annie
Ernaux, Henry F. May amongst others, but in the second part I focus
mainly on Paul Auster's work which explores many issues about
writing on an other.
In the sixth chapter I examine what the use of photographs can tell
us about ideas on the past and how they can highlight the main themes
and preoccupations of autobiographies, such as memory, relationship
to parents, to the past, fictionality, self-invention and self-image.
Discussions of Roland Barthes's autobiography, and his book on
photography, make up the first part of this chapter, with a specific
emphasis on his thoughts on the image and the truth-value of
photographs. In the next section I look at the links between memory
and photographs in Georges Perec's autobiography, at photographs as
clues to the past in Auster's text and finally at Ondaatje's use of
documents in his book on Billy the Kid and in his autobiography,
Running in the Family.
In attempting to demarcate the borderlines between autobiography
and fiction in recent life-writing I hope to show that these borderlines
exist at the level of both theme and structure, and that in negotiating
them autobiographers grapple with how they can represent the past.
They not only face the problem confronted by historiography with
regard to the representation of the past, but also more private issues
appropriate to the nature of autobiography, such as the role of
memory, and the place of the unique, and the private, in the public
sphere.
Chapter One
Memory and the Autobiographical Process
Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster
It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice. It is a
voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own. It
speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child [. . .] At
times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing facts to
suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth[. . .]
At other times it sings to him. At still other times it whispers. And then
there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain..1
Longtemps j'ai cherch les traces de mon histoire, consult des cartes
et des annuaires, des monceaux d'archives. Je n'ai rien trouv et il me
semblait parfois que j'avais rv, qu'il n'y avait eu qu'un inoubliable
cauchemar.2
1. Introduction: Recollection as Investigation
Writing an autobiography involves a dialogue with, in Paul Auster's

terms, the voice of memory, since, as some critics have stressed,
autobiography is inherently the genre of memory. In this chapter I will
examine the role of memory and how it marks out one of the
borderlines between fiction and autobiography. There are three main
areas, I believe, where memory and fiction interact in autobiography:
firstly in memory's relationship to writing, secondly in the role of
forgetting in life-writing, and thirdly in the connection between
private memories and public events. In her study of the role of
memory in medieval culture Mary Carruthers explains that in the
memory schemes so common in that era, iteration - or reciting texts in
1 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1988)
p. 124. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
2 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance (Paris: Denol, 1975) p. 10.
(Hereafter quoted in the text with David Bellos' translation in footnotes.) 'For
years I sought out traces of my history, looking up maps and directories and
piles of archives. I found nothing, an it sometimes seemed as though I had
dreamt, that there had been only an unforgettable nightmare.' W or The
Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1988) p. 3.
12 Borderlines
a parrot-like fashion - was not considered vital, but the 'crucial task of
recollection is investigatio, 'tracking-down', a word related to vestigia,
'tracks' or 'footprints''.3 In writing an autobiography writers embark on
this kind of 'investigation', tracking down memories that have left
tracks or footprints, and attempt to lend these memories form and
coherence.
The underlying theme of this chapter is the relationship between
writing and memory. In the first section I focus specifically on that
relationship, asking, for example, what are the connections between
writing and memory and what processes are at work in writing
memories, and how do we remember in writing? The writers I discuss
in this chapter are all very much concerned with an aspect of memory
one can term recollection as investigation. In this context the
investigation is twofold: on the one hand the writers investigate their
own memories and on the other they investigate the possibilities of
writing these memories. One could say that memory is what is crucial
to autobiography and must, therefore, help define the border between
autobiography and fiction. The statement 'I remember' has an
unimpeachable status, others can challenge facts, not 'memories'. It is
also what makes autobiography a unique genre. It is not only the
memories themselves that are the autobiographer's subject, but also
memory itself and the process of remembering is engaged with in all
of the texts examined here. That process becomes visible in the way
the autobiographers display a willingness or unwillingness to
remember, as in some cases they voice a need, either to forget or to
remember. The writing process reveals a need to confirm or deny
memories, and the memories themselves are embellished,
interrogated, or conjured up.
Writing an autobiography signals a drive towards remembering, but
I maintain that the autobiographical process must also involve
forgetting, as the writer chooses one memory and discards another,
writes one version of that memory at the cost of another, probably
equally valid, version. This leads to the second section of this chapter
3 Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval

Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 20.
Memory and the Autobiographical Process 13
and its central question: to what extent does writing one's memories
constitute a process of forgetting? I attempt to pinpoint moments of
forgetting in a number of key texts and explore how these moments
affect their structure and what this tells us about the role of forgetting
in life-writing. If the autobiographers display a need to remember, do
they also long to forget? The relationship between private memories
and public events can highlight some questions autobiography raises
about our relationship with the past, and our representation of it, and
in the third section I look at how that relationship manifests itself in
the texts. I examine how each author has forged a unique conjunction
between their own memories and public events and how that
connection impinges on the borderline between fiction and
autobiography.
The attempt to hear the sometimes unclear voice of memory is a
theme common to the texts examined here: Georges Perec's W ou le
souvenir d'enfance (1975), Lillian Hellman's autobiographical works
and Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude (1982). It is not only the
imperfection of human memory that concerns them, but more
fundamentally the sense that the past will not, in simple terms, explain
the present. Nevertheless, what unites these otherwise very different
works is the emphasis on the importance of remembering even if one
fails to come up with the 'truth'. Although they could not be more
different in style and structure, these works are also fine instances of
the complex dialogue between public and private memory and the
individual's relationship to history. While the authors show a
considerable distrust towards their own memories there are at times
powerful moments of memory in the texts. These moments of memory
do at times overcome the doubts the writers express towards
remembering. They can illuminate some points in their lives and to
some extent their reasons for writing their lives.
Paul Auster's autobiographical work, The Invention of Solitude, was
written shortly after the death of his father, and the first half 'Portrait
of an Invisible Man', which I will discuss in a later chapter, is mainly
a memoir of his father. The second half is called 'The Book of
Memory'. Here Auster ruminates on themes such as chance, father-son
relationships, memory, and writing, among other things. The central
14 Borderlines
theme is how and why we remember, how remembering connects to

other aspects of our lives and how remembering relates to writing.
The narrative is by no means linear, rather Auster travels through
other stories, other works of art, literature and philosophy, his
childhood memories, and recent events in his life and in the life of his
son, in order to examine the role of memory in his existence.
The autobiographical project of the American playwright and script-
writer Lillian Hellman can shed light on the complex relationship
between memory and forgetting in autobiography. Hellman wrote four
autobiographical works: An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento
(1973) and Scoundrel Time (1976), which were later collected in one
volume, Three (1979) with new comments by the author, and a year
later Maybe: A Story which chronicles Hellman's relationship with a
woman called Sarah. An Unfinished Woman is the work that most
resembles a 'conventional' autobiography. It is a relatively
straightforward account of her life, although Hellman moves
backward and forward in time, and includes excerpts from her diary.
As the title suggests, Hellman not only feels that she herself was
unfinished, but also that her autobiographical project was just starting:
her memories were unfinished. So she continued with Pentimento, a
series of portraits of people and places from her past and a chapter on
the theatre. Some of the people Hellman writes about in this volume
had not been mentioned in the first work, as if they had been
forgotten, and their importance only now comes to light; others are
people she revisits and reappraises. Scoundrel Time is an account of
what happened to her during the McCarthy era, when she was called
before the House Committee of Un-American Activities. Here, she is
at once writing about public events and her own private history.
Maybe: A Story is the most curious work of the four as Hellman charts
her relationship with a woman she does not seem to know much
about, but whose life has been strangely intertwined with Hellman's
life. Throughout these works she questions, interrogates and rewrites
her past.4 The texts are all marked with the belief that her explanations
4 Maurice F. Brown describes these works as follows: 'In brief, the

sequence of volumes suggests an underlying philosophical concern which
and analyses of the past will not yield as much as she hopes for. What
is interesting for our purposes is her constant questioning of the past,
of her own and other people's motives and actions, and how she
covers significant events of the twentieth century, such as the Spanish
Civil War, the Second World War and the McCarthy era.
Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance is also pertinent to my enquiry.
Here, the mixture of childhood memories and an adventure story
constitutes a remarkable attempt at writing the painful, almost
forgotten, past, a private loss that has been overshadowed by public
events and the death of millions. Perec's unique way of intertwining
fictional chapters and autobiographical chapters, shows that an
investigation of memory can be a fertile ground for experimental life-
writing.
2. Writing and Memory: The Presence of the Past
Writing and memory have long been entwined in people's perception

and Carruthers traces this connection from Plato through Cicero to St
Augustine.5 But what kind of process does remembering entail? David
F. Krell explains that:
Remembering instigates a peculiar kind of presence. It 'has'

an object of perception or knowledge without activating
perception or knowledge as such and without confusing
past and present. For while remembering, a man tells
himself that he is now present to something that was
earlier.6
increasingly dictates autobiographical form. Hellman's life-writing turned

into a quest for her "true" life - a quest which pushed both her historical and
poetic commitments to their ragged edges.' 'Autobiography and Memory: The
Case of Lillian Hellman', Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 8
(1985), 1-11, (p. 3).
5 Carruthers, op. cit., p. 21.
6 David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing: On the Verge
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 15.
16 Borderlines
Autobiographers often attempt to capture this peculiar kind of

presence of the past in writing.7 They not only write on memories, but
on the process of remembering, and on that presence which, although
it does not confuse the past and the present, still blurs the edges of the
present.
Paul Auster in his 'Book of Memory' proclaims more than once that
he feels he is no longer living in the present: 'His life no longer
seemed to dwell in the present. [. . .] Later, in a time of greater clarity,
he would refer to this sensation as 'nostalgia for the present'' (The
Invention of Solitude, p. 76). And later he claims:
His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Each time

he saw a child, he would try to imagine what it would look
like as a grown-up. Each time he saw an old person, he
would try to imagine what that person had looked like as a
child. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 87)
The borderline between the past and the present is blurred, on some
level they seem to co-exist. The present has receded, as the presence
of the past invades its space. Auster describes seeing things in the
present only to be reminded of the past:
And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on

him, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as
if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive
in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end he
was at a loss to say which of these things he was actually
seeing. And therefore it happened, often it happened, that
his life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. (The
Invention of Solitude, p. 135)
7 A good example of this occurs in Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past'
when she explains: 'Those moments - in the nursery, on the road to the beach
- can still be more real than the present moment [. . .] At times I can go back
to St Ives more completely than I can this morning. I can reach a state where
I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there.' Moments of Being:
Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1978), pp. 75-76.
Memory has become an almost overwhelming force. It is as if the

present transforms into the past before his eyes, turning one thing into
another, children into old people, and old people into children. The
past and the present have become interchangeable, as memory is all-
invading. The structure of the text is marked by this sensibility as
Auster connects the present events he recounts to past events. The
time of Auster's writing he describes consists in a couple of years
following the death of his father and the break-up of his marriage,
when he lives alone in a tiny room away from his young son, and for a
time takes care of his dying grandfather. This is a time of difficulty,
change, and transition, and in the way that he describes it, it is as if the
past is more real to him than the present. In writing, he fills his
loneliness with memories, removing himself from the present and, in
one sense, from himself. He writes the 'Book of Memory' in the third
person: it is the story of 'A.' he writes, not 'I'. In Auster's attempt to
rebuild his life, his sense of identity and memory, he connects
different parts, people, and places in his life leading up to this
moment. Thus, the reader is not introduced to one event or one
memory, but to the connections between these events and follows the
way in which Auster's memory works in the writing.8
In An Unfinished Woman Lillian Hellman describes feeling the
presence of the past acutely. She visits Moscow for the first time in
twenty years since she spent a few eventful months there during the
Second World War. On the aeroplane coming into Moscow she is
overcome by sadness. She is apprehensive about meeting people she
has not seen in over twenty years so she hides away in her hotel room
that night to be alone with her memories:
8 Auster also mentions memory systems: 'To follow with a detailed

description of classical memory systems, complete with charts, diagrams,
symbolic drawings. Raymond Lull, for example, or Robert Fludd, not to
speak of Giordano Bruno, the great Nolan burned at the stake in 1600. Places
and images as catalysts for remembering other places and images: things,
events, the buried artefacts of one's own life. Mnemotechnics. To follow with
Bruno's notion that the structure of human thought corresponds to the
structure of nature. And therefore to conclude that everything, in some sense,
is connected to everything else.' The Invention of Solitude, p. 76.
18 Borderlines
They were not bad memories, most of them, and I was not
disturbed by them, or so I thought, but I knew that I had
taken a whole period of my life and thrown it somewhere,
always intending to call for it again, but now that it came
time to call, I couldn't remember where I had left it. Did
other people do this, drop the past in a used car lot and
leave it for so long that one couldn't even remember the
name of the road?9
What Hellman describes in these pages is a physical need to

remember, to be by herself and ruminate on this period she claims to
have thrown away. Surprisingly the period in question is not the time
she spent in Moscow during the war but what happened to her after
the war, events which have marked her life ever since, so that she
finds herself incapable of explaining it to her Russian friends, who
were not there to witness it. The sudden resurgence of these memories
invades the present. Moscow recedes and the memories take over. The
difficulty which Hellman faces is that of explaining one's past; how
life has affected one. It is by writing an autobiography that Hellman
attempts to explain the past, and tries to let the past explain her
present. One can speculate that this 'moment of memory' was one of
the reasons why she started writing on her past as An Unfinished
Woman was published only a few years after her return from Moscow.
This physical need to remember can include a need to write down
what one remembers, and to see if that can explain the present.
In her description of her experience in Moscow Hellman emphasises
the need to be alone with her memories. The past is there with her to
the extent that she cannot meet people who were not there and do not
know of this past. Hellman indulges in this presence and describes
her feelings in some detail but she does not tell the reader what she
remembered as she sat in the hotel room. It is the process of
remembering rather than the memory itself that is her subject. The
9 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman in Three: An Unfinished Woman,

Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979) p. 184. (Hereafter
quoted in the text.)
reader is drawn in by the descriptions of the effects of remembering

without knowing what the memory is about. For the period Hellman
claims to have thrown away is the McCarthy era and although she
refers to it in passing in An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento she
does not write about it in any detail until her third autobiographical
work Scoundrel Time. She still has not retrieved it from the used car
lot and when she does so it is with a mixture of trepidation and a
conviction that she must write on it.
This presence of the past never causes nostalgia or any kind of
longing for the past in Hellman's text, neither does it induce a sense of
peace with the past. Her constant doubt and criticism of the past are
much in evidence throughout her work. She explains her relationship
with the past in the last paragraph of An Unfinished Woman:
But I am not yet old enough to like the past better than the
present, although there are nights when I have a passing
sadness for the unnecessary pains, the self-made
foolishness that was, is, and will be. I do regret that I have
spent too much of my life trying to find what I called 'truth',
trying to find what I called 'sense'. I never knew what I
meant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for. All I
mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I
wasted too much time. However. (An Unfinished Woman,
p. 300)
This paragraph can also be read as a comment on the text itself -

Hellman's constant search for 'truth' and her attempts at making 'sense'
of the past and her dissatisfaction with what she comes up with. The
last word in the book, 'however' signals some optimism, as if it (the
text/the life) was worth it - but it leaves the text open-ended (as
autobiographies are wont to do). It is clear that this is what drives
Hellman's autobiographical process: the search for 'truth' and 'sense'
invites her to interrogate and investigate her memory.
All through her autobiographical works Hellman describes the
people in her life, close friends, casual acquaintances and strangers
alike. The descriptions are coloured by a constant questioning of her
own and other people's motives. The book contains anecdotes of
20 Borderlines
people who have at some point or another been important to her, some
from her childhood, some from her adult life. Pentimento is a series of
portraits of other people but through writing on others Hellman
investigates the formation of her character, her beliefs, sexuality, and
friendships. She tells anecdotes of other people so they come alive as
characters but at the same time she tells us what her relationship to
those people meant to her.10 Hellman has moved from a rather
straightforward, albeit questioning, account of her own life in An
Unfinished Woman to a series of portraits of people close and not so
close to her in Pentimento.
The writing of Pentimento seems to have been conditioned
completely by memory. Here, it seems as if Hellman is waiting for the
voice of memory to speak. In a note added to the text in the Three
edition she explains:
'Pentimento' was written by what psychoanalysis calls, in

now weary semi-accuracy, a kind of 'free association'. I did
not know from one portrait to another what I would do
next, with the exception of 'Julia' where, without much
hope, I wanted to try once more. I had not, for example,
consciously thought of Bethe for perhaps thirty years; the
man I call Willy has been dead for over twenty-five years
and in those years I remember only one conversation about
him, with his son-in-law, a few minutes of nothing. When I
finished one portrait there was always a long wait. All
kinds of people and places came back, of course, but I
knew I was waiting each time not for what had been most
important to me, but what had some root that I had never
traced before.11
10 Marcus K. Billson and Sidonie A. Smith point out: 'Nowhere, perhaps, is

this latent self-revelation more intriguing than in Lillian Hellman's memoirs,
An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento. By eschewing conventional
autobiography and focusing on the people and historical circumstances of her
past, Hellman invites the reader into a world of "others" who, as they come
together in her memory, become significant in the articulation of her 'self'.'
'Lillian Hellman and the Strategy of the "Other"', in Women's Autobiography:
Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980), pp. 163-179, p. 163.
11 Pentimento in Three, p. 586. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
Having written An Unfinished Woman, Hellman turned, it seems, to

the not so obvious, to the people and events she had forgotten, waiting
for her memory to help her trace the roots.12 These portraits are
connected to some trait in Hellman's character, to aspects such as her
sexual awakening, but not necessarily to specific periods in her life.
The people Hellman writes about in 'free-association' are people she
has only tenuous links with, and vague knowledge of, as for instance
Bethe and Willy. They are not there because they played a large role
in Hellman's life, but they represent a period, episode, or an event that
can help her trace some aspect of her character, her identity or
sexuality. It is, therefore, a different form of autobiographical writing
from An Unfinished Woman, and memory seems to perform a
different role; from recollecting the past in An Unfinished Woman to
rumination, free-association and letting the forgotten and not-thought-
of take control. It is an investigation of the smaller things, the details,
the overlooked. It is a different form, but the tone remains as
questioning and searching as before.
This awareness of the gaps and unexplored spaces of memory is
very obvious and the gaps are of great importance in themselves in
Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance. The focus, in the chapters on
12 It is worth noting here that the chapter on the woman Hellman calls 'Julia'
which was later made into a film, has caused some controversy. Muriel
Gardiner Buttinger has come forward explaining that her life matches in
detail what Hellman describes as the life of her childhood friend Julia, but
Buttinger claims she never met Hellman. See William Wright, Lillian
Hellman: The Image, the Woman (London: Sigdwick and Jackson 1987), pp.
402-412. Hellman's memoirs have been fiercly criticised for lack of accuracy
and fictionalisation of events by a number of people, for instance Martha
Gellhorn and Mary McCarthy, but for some reason not until many years after
their publication. Hellman sued McCarthy for libel after one particular attack,
but died before the case came to trial. Wright also gives a detailed account of
their feud. Why Hellman specifically has come under such scrutiny is not
quite clear, but one can infer that as she handles many sensitive events and
people's connections to those events, there are bound to be resentments and a
resistance to giving her the last word on events that affected many people's
lives.
22 Borderlines
childhood memories, is on its gaps - the family Perec lost and hardly
remembers, his father in the war and his mother in the camps, and the
childhood memories that often prove to be wrong. The moment of
memory is here strongly linked to writing, it is almost as if memory
were not possible without writing and writing impossible without
memory. As Perec explains in a short introduction to his book:
Le rcit d'aventures, ct, a quelque chose de grandiose,

ou peut-tre de suspect. Car il commence par raconter une
histoire et, d'un seul coup, se lance dans une autre: dans
cette rupture, cette cassure qui suspend le rcit autour d'on
ne sait quelle attente, se trouve le lieu initial d'o est sorti
ce livre, ces points de supension auxquels se sont accrochs
les fils rompus de l'enfance et la trame de l'criture. (W ou
le souvenir d'enfance, back cover)13
The structure of W ou le souvenir d'enfance is a complex one. Perec

mixes his few, and in some ways insubstantial, childhood memories
with a strange and ominous fictional tale (or two fictional tales) in
alternating chapters in an intriguing juxtaposition.14 The second
fictional part is a story of an island society that is completely
organised around the cult of sport. The fictional chapters and the
childhood memories seem very different at first sight but there are
sentences that are almost interchangeable. This one is from the
fictional narrator in the first chapter: 'Quoi qu'il arrive, quoi que je
fasse, j'tais le seul dpositaire, la seule mmoire vivante, le seul
13 'Next to it, the adventure story is rather grandiose, or maybe dubious. For
it begins to tell one tale, and then, all of a sudden, launches into another. In
this break, in this split suspending the story on an unidentifiable expectation,
can be found the point of departure for the whole of this book: the points of
suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and the web of writing
are caught.' Preface, no page number.
14 See a very stimulating study by Philippe Lejeune on the reading of W ou
le souvenir d'enfance in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993),
88-98.
vestige de ce monde. Ceci, plus que toute autre considration, m'a

dcid crire' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 10).15
To be 'la seule mmoire vivante' is also Perec's lot but it seems that
he writes not because of that fact but almost despite it:
je n'cris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n'cris pas

pour dire que je n'ai rien dire. J'cris: j'cris parce que
nous avons vcu ensemble, parce que j'ai t un parmi eux,
ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps prs de leur corps;
j'cris parce qu'ils ont laiss en moi leur marque indlbile
et que la trace en est l'criture: leur souvenir est mort
l'criture; l'criture est le souvenir de leur mort et
l'affirmation de ma vie. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p.
59)16
To remember can be a call to write; an impetus to erect some kind of

monument to the memory or the event, but also to call on others to
remember, to raise a monument to the remembering process itself. It is
to make concrete the peculiar presence of the past, and the importance
of memory. As Michael Sheringham observes:
the inevitable failure of [Perec's] attempt to write about [his

memories] is itself a memento mori, a repetition of absence
and annihilation. Regardless of its relative success or
failure, the act of writing - in its inherent endlessness, its
eternal severance from the concrete, its intrinsic incapacity
to grasp the real, its basis in absence - is attuned to the
reality of loss.17
15 'Whatever may happen now, whatever I may now do, I was the sole
depository, the only living memory, the only vestige of that world. That, more
than any other consideration, was what made me decide to write.' p. 4.
16 'I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because
we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their
shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their
indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing;
writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.' p. 42.
17 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires:
Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 323.
24 Borderlines
But the question why one writes is notoriously difficult and one that
Perec has addressed elsewhere: 'to the question of 'why I write', which
I can never answer except by writing, and thus deferring forever the
very moment when, by ceasing to write, that image would visibly
cohere, like a jigsaw puzzle inexorably brought to its completion.'18
Amidst the gaps and absence there are powerful, physical memory
experiences that may have contributed to the urge to write. Perec
describes being rewarded with a medal at school only to have it taken
away from him, unjustly, after a fight:
la sensation cnesthsique de ce dsquilibre impos par les

autres, venu d'au-dessus de moi et retombant sur moi, reste
si fortement inscrite dans mon corps que je me demande si
ce souvenir ne masque pas en fait son exact contraire: non
pas le souvenir d'une mdaille arrache, mais celui d'une
toile pingle. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 76)19
This belief that what we remember clearly must be erroneous and

therefore significant has been prevalent from Freud onward. Perec
here gives a new meaning to this rather innocent memory of a child
unjustly treated, believing it to conceal another much more terrifying
memory with much broader implications. This is a good example of
one of the processes at work when writing on memory; the initial
memory is connected to something else, thereby giving it greater
emphasis, and a broader significance for the reader. All the writers
discussed here avoid making direct causal links between past events
and their present situation. They do make connections, but often
surprising ones, and the reader can never be sure where the memories
will lead.
18 Georges Perec, 'Statement of Intent' trans. David Bellos in Review of

Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 21-22, (p. 22).
19 'the sensation in my whole body of a loss of balance imposed by others,
coming from above and falling on to me, remains so deeply imprinted on my
body that I wonder if this memory does not in fact conceal its precise
opposite: not the memory of a medal torn off, but the memory of a star
pinned on.' p. 54.
Moments of interpretation and analysis of the past are strongly

linked in these texts to almost overwhelming memories. These points
of luminosity, these powerful memory experiences seem to invite the
authors to write on them, to attempt to make sense of them. They are
like sparks of creativity that open up new ways into the past. Writing
and memory here become so closely linked that it is difficult to tell the
two apart. Such moments of memory become all the more powerful
given that the authors we are considering are very sceptical of the
power of memory. This does not mean that these moments allow us
clear and unobstructed access to the past, what is interesting about
them is that they seem to invite rich interpretation and analysis and
serve to some extent as catalysts for the writing of a life.
Maurice Halbwachs's work on memory provides insights into,
among other things, how memories change:
Recollections which have not been thought about for a long

time are reproduced without change. But when reflection
begins to operate, when instead of letting the past recur, we
reconstruct it through an effort of reasoning, what happens
is that we distort the past, because we wish to introduce a
greater coherence.20
In this view the past is not in itself coherent and we inadvertently

distort it by making it so. This, of course, is very much apparent when
we write on the past. But it seems to me that Auster, Perec and
Hellman show a distinct awareness of this in their writing. Hellman
attempts to make the past cohere, while constantly reminding herself
that this is what she is doing. Perec, on the other hand, does not
attempt coherence to the same extent, and Auster's search for
coherence is always marked by the belief that if one gives meaning to
connections, coincidences and chance, one makes up an imaginary
world inside the real world; a method he rejects (The Invention of
20 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser

(Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 183
26 Borderlines
Solitude, p. 147).21 Rather Auster points to possible meanings,

possible connections, while at the same time warning against a simple
meaning-making process, which would lead him to some absolute
truth about his past.
Hellman's autobiographical works, with the exception of Maybe, all
include excerpts from her diaries. She turns to them when she needs a
detailed account of some event, or to check dates of events. But it
seems that she is mostly unsatisfied with what she finds there. One of
those diaries is from her stay in Moscow in the winter of 1940:
In those five months I kept diaries of greater detail and

length than I have ever done before or since, but when I
read them last year, and again last week, they did not
include what had been most important to me, or what the
passing years have made important. (An Unfinished
Woman, p. 144)
The diary is an everyday form, often occupied with the domestic, the
detail, and usually free of any hierarchical interpretation of events; the
mundane and the eventful are all allocated the same space and form.22
The diary seems to disappoint Hellman with its lack of interpretation,
lack of clarity, omissions of what she has later to come to view as
important and its inability to capture what it was 'really like', as she
complains of her diaries from her visit to Spain during the Spanish
Civil War. All the same Hellman includes excerpts from them, and
that reminds us that remembering is an active, ever-changing process
that can never be cast in stone. The entries are there as relics from the
past which carry documentary value, but not the 'truth'-value Hellman
seeks. Memory, then, is never complete both in the sense that it never
21 Dennis Barone points out that creating an imaginary world inside the real
world is what Auster's characters in the New York Trilogy do and it leads to
their downfall. See 'Auster's Memory' in Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14
(Spring 1994) 32-34.
22 A helpful account of the diary and its relationship to gender can be found
in Rebecca Hogan's essay 'Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a
Feminine Form', in Autobiography and the Question of Gender, ed. Shirley
Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp. 95-107.
tells one exactly how things were and in the sense that it can never be
'completed'. That is also why Hellman includes more notes on the
texts in the later edition. The reader feels closer to the events in
reading the diary entries, they seem to invite the reader to be present
to the past. But time, distance, remembering and rewriting all offer if
not quite another version of events, then at least a different
interpretation and analysis of what was important and what was not.
The main difference between the excerpts from Hellman's diary and
the rest of the text is the analysis and the critical inquiry for some
deeper or different meaning of past events that give the
autobiographical text a sense of overall unity of purpose. The text is
layered here; it is comprised of a description of a memory; description
of remembering; note on the description; diary entry; note on the
diary entry; interpretation of the memory, and finally a note on the
text. Writing on memory takes place on different levels, with different
degrees and types of analysis and interpretation, and instigates
different levels of presence of the past.
Auster's work is also comprised of layers of text. His memories are
intertwined with memories of stories and numerous quotations from
other texts, spanning a wide range of texts, from the Bible to
Pinocchio, but all corresponding to or elucidating on a theme in the
text. 'The Book of Memory' includes thirteen books of memory (each
a few pages long), each a variation on a theme, similar to a musical
work. In the first book Auster mentions in elliptical sentences all the
main themes that he then enlarges on in the text. It is only the last
book, book thirteen, which is different and contains a list of sentences
all starting with 'I remember', reminiscent of Perec's work Je me
souviens (1978), a collection of just such sentences.
Auster is fascinated by all kinds of chance occurrences and
coincidences. For Auster there is a very clear correlation between
writing and memory, he sees 'the act of writing as an act of memory'
(The Invention of Solitude, p. 142). This partly accounts for the
structure of the text: each memory corresponds to another memory, or
a piece of text from elsewhere, or a recent event, or all of those things,
and writing calls forth these connections. Some texts for him are also
clear instances of memory, as he is certain that Collodi's Pinocchio
28 Borderlines
must be a book of memory (The Invention of Solitude, p. 163). The

understanding of childhood and the magical father-son relationship
described in Pinocchio must be from Collodi's own childhood Auster
concludes; as if it was not possible to write such a book without
remembrance: 'The puppet had become the image of himself as a
child. To dip the puppet into the inkwell, therefore, was to use his
creation to write the story of himself. For it is only in the darkness of
solitude that the work of memory begins' (The Invention of Solitude, p.
164). This is the third thread that Auster weaves with writing and
memory: solitude. His own solitude, the general solitude of the writer,
the solitude of madness and writing (Auster mentions Hlderlin and
Dickinson). The solitude of those in hiding and exile (he includes
Anne Frank, and his Jewish friend's father who hid in an attic room in
Paris during the war), and Jonah's solitude in the whale. He also
maintains that one shares another man's solitude by translating his
work, which is also the work of memory as one word is turned into
another.
These three areas: chance, father-son relationships, and solitude, are
so intimately linked in this text, that it is nearly impossible to talk
about one aspect without mentioning the others. Auster writes on the
places of memory: rooms that are filled with memory. His own room,
Anne Frank's room, Dickinson's room, these are the concrete spaces of
memory, writing and solitude. Places of remembrance that have now
(or some of them at least) become monuments to this remembrance
and writing. This investigation of solitude in 'The Book of Memory' is
what links it to 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' and gives new meaning
to the title as he invents not only his father's solitude (see chapter 5),
but also his own.
Auster writes on his life by remembering other lives, other writers,
other stories, other texts. He writes about himself in the third person,
thereby putting himself beside other characters in other texts he has
read. But while writing on these connections and coincidences he
emphasises strongly that they have a completely different meaning in
fiction from their place in life-writing. Anything that forms a pattern
is a collection of meaningless coincidences in real life, whereas if it
was part of a plot in a novel the pattern would point to a subtext or
symbolism. But looking for patterns and correlations in his life is still
an important activity for him, it is his way of making sense of the past,
and, of course, all these patterns he charts accumulate and become
meaningful, even though they never achieve the status of a symbol. As
he explains, the meaning of a life can never be as neatly deposited as a
life of a character in a novel:
people do sometimes try to understand their lives in terms

of historical conditions, it does not have the same effect [as
in a novel]. Something is missing: the grandeur, the grasp
of the general, the illusion of metaphysical truth. One says:
Don Quixote is consciousness gone haywire in a realm of
the imaginary. One looks at a mad person in the world (A.
at his schizophrenic sister, for example), and says nothing.
This is the sadness of a wasted life, perhaps - but no more.
(The Invention of Solitude, pp. 146-147)
For Auster, then, creating such a pattern of a life in autobiographical

writing would only be an illusion as it would move to the level of
fiction, although by pointing to these connections in his life, he comes
very close to creating a 'pattern' of his life. The 'Book of Memory' is
an account of his life, his work, his reading, his fatherhood, his being
a son: all linked together in one room, and the distinction between past
and present becomes blurred. It is as if everything existed
simultaneously in the text, as chronological order is absent. What
matters is not just the events themselves, but the connections between
them and what makes this connection possible is memory; hence the
title 'Book of Memory'. Auster connects many disparate things in this
text; his own father-son theme with other fathers and sons in history
and literature, which he then connects to other things, just as in
Sherzad's stories, which he quotes, where she never tells what is in
front of her eyes, but always a parallel story. 'The Book of Memory' is
a collection of parallels, connections and coincidences that hang
together by the thread of writing and acquire meaning through
association.
The text starts with the phrase 'it was, it never will be again', which
is repeated time and again throughout the work. But it is a phrase
30 Borderlines
Auster in a way sets out to disprove as he later describes memory as

being 'the space in which a thing happens for the second time' (The
Invention of Solitude, p. 83). He also speaks of the importance of
memory in and of itself. He commemorates a day each year on which
he and his friend had decided something 'big' was going to happen.
Although nothing 'big' ever happened that day, he still remembers the
date. Other people's writing and paintings can just as well trigger his
own memory. Just as reading other people's memoirs always brings to
mind some incident from one's own childhood. Van Gogh's paintings
trigger Auster's memory of the first poems he wrote after having seen
an exhibition of Van Gogh's work with his first love. He does not
remember the poems themselves, but he remembers everything else.
'The Book of Memory' is not linear but circular. It does not move from
one point to the next, but back and forth continuously, in the same
room, very much like memory works. New associations are found,
new glimpses of the same topics, and the constant underlying theme is
losing a father or losing a son. There is one moment in time, but it
could be a hundred years, it could be tomorrow. On the first page he
says: 'It was. It never will be again' and on the last page he adds to that
sentence: 'Remember' (The Invention of Solitude, p. 172).
In Auster's work the past is thrust into the present by a place, a face,
a text, or a story, which he then connects to a memory, much as in the
memory systems he mentions. In his text there is a mixture of literary
and historical consciousness, and although he firmly links memory
and writing, they are never quite simultaneous acts:
Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's

private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which
is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a
witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, there-
fore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were
reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time
emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance[. . .]
And yet, the telling of it is necessarily slow, a delicate
business of trying to remember what has already been
remembered. The pen will never be able to move fast
enough to write down every word discovered in the space
of memory. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 139)
For Auster writing on memories is therefore an attempt to recreate the

process of remembering, 'to remember what has already been
remembered'. In recreating this process, the memories are looked at
again, interrogated and investigated once more, as the writing process
by definition has to be more selective than remembering ever can be.
The editing that is evident in these three texts involves corrections of
the autobiographers' faulty memories, the results of forgetting, or
notes that add some information that they have only learned much
later. It serves to remind us of the difficulty of writing on memory and
the complex relationship we have with the past. The editing process is
a long one. First it is at work as one remembers, then there is the
editing that goes on when the memories are written down, and the last
stage - very visible in these texts - as these writers re-read and/or
rewrite their memories. This highlights the fact that remembering is a
never-ending process and so is writing one's memories. These texts
with their footnotes, corrections, diaries and notes make this process
visible and remind us that the remembering process is never
'complete'.
3. The Role of the Forgotten
After describing her first memories Virginia Woolf goes on to

explain: 'These then are some of my first memories. But of course as
an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does
not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.'23 In
this section I am concerned with what part the forgotten plays in
autobiography. If writing is an act of memory, is it perhaps also an act
of forgetting? Thomas Butler says in his essay 'Memory: A Mixed
Blessing' that:
nonretrieval, forgetting, even limited amnesia under acute

stress seem to be an integral part of a normal intelligence,
23 Woolf, op. cit., p. 78.

32 Borderlines
and are not necessarily signs of a faulty or imperfect

system. Any proper study of Memory, then has also to take
into account forgetting.24
This can be reversed to say that any study of forgetting has to take
into account remembering. This is the central problem one faces when
writing about forgetting. The two terms, remembering and forgetting,
are interlocked in such a way that it is almost impossible to discuss
one without the other. Another problem one faces in this discussion is
that forgetting represents something that is not there, a void, an
absence, and is therefore unsayable. All the same I will attempt to
locate areas of forgetting in autobiography.
Autobiography can be described as an active process of
remembering, but it does not always represent a smooth flow of
memories. There are stumbles, hesitations, doubts, where it seems the
forgotten has become visible. This can be seen in some texts as gaps
in the narrative, or when the text moves from one specific childhood
memory to a more general picture of childhood, or when
autobiographers include evidence that contradicts their own memory
of events.
These gaps, or oddities in the texts alert the reader to the part
forgetting plays in the process of remembering and in the broader
instance to the part it plays in the autobiographical process. Hellman
writes in the opening paragraph of Pentimento:
Old paint on canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes

transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some
pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a
woman's dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is
no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because
the painter 'repented', changed his mind. Perhaps it would
be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later
choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. That is all
I mean about the people in this book. The paint has aged
24 Thomas Butler, 'Memory: A Mixed Blessing', in Memory: History,

Culture and the Mind, ed. Thomas Butler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989),
pp. 1-31, p. 16.
now and I wanted to see what was there for me once, what
is there for me now. (Pentimento, p. 309)
This image is reminiscent of Auster's voice of memory, which is

always in the background. What was once forgotten has resurfaced
through the passing of time. A point that is illustrated in many
autobiographical works is that it is possible to retrieve what was once
forgotten. The writing in Pentimento is constantly informed by this
knowledge, as Hellman includes a whole chapter on a man whom she
claims not to have thought about in twenty-five years. She has no
illusions that what she writes is an exact account of how things were.
Hellman is constantly aware throughout her writing of the
complicated relationship between the past and present. Nothing is
easy, straightforward or obvious. Everything could have happened
differently and could be told differently. This is a constant theme in
Hellman's work; seeing again, reading again, writing again. It is the
repetition itself that changes how one sees things. What she looks at as
important now she did not view as significant then and there are a
number of unanswered questions about the people she met. Her
experience in Moscow is also a kind of 'pentimento'. When she sees
her old friends she sees behind them herself before the McCarthy era
and then sees herself as she is now and realises how much has
changed, it 'is a way of seeing and then seeing again'. But it only
happens with the passing of time, as the paint ages, that what was
there before becomes apparent. As Auster's text clearly demonstrates,
our memory consists of layers and underneath the first layer there are
other texts, other stories, other lives, and all exist simultaneously in
our memory.
Hellman's book on the McCarthy era, Scoundrel Time, brings in a
more public aspect of forgetting. She was blacklisted and her long-
time partner Dashiell Hammett was sent to prison. Despite the
devastating effect this episode had on her life, it is only mentioned in
passing in the first two volumes. But in Scoundrel Time she has
decided to remember, coming to the conclusion that forgetting was
dangerous. It is a work that points to the political implications of
forgetting.
34 Borderlines
The last autobiographical work is intriguingly titled Maybe: A Story.

Hellman chronicles her relationship with a woman called Sarah, who
is not mentioned in the other works. A woman she knows very little
about, and what she knows is contradicted by other people's accounts.
This is Hellman's last work and in it all her doubts about memory and
the difficulties of representing the past culminate. Here she describes a
process of remembering and forgetting:
The piles and bundles and ribbons and rags turn into
years, and then the years are gone. There is a light behind
you certainly, but it is not bright enough to illuminate all of
what you had hoped for. The light seems shadowed or
masked with an unknown fabric. So much of what you had
counted on as a solid wall of convictions now seems on bad
nights, or in sickness, or just weakness, no longer made of
much that can be leaned against. It is then that one can
barely place oneself in time. All that you would swear had
been, can only be found again if you have the energy to dig
hard enough, and that is hard on the feet and the back, and
sometimes you are frightened that near an edge is
nothing.25
The 'unknown fabric' Hellman mentions we might call forgetting, and

here forgetting the past is countered with the fear that there might be
nothing to remember. Hence the title Maybe. Hellman emphasises an
important point in this segment, that of being lost in time, a feeling
that forgetting the past seems to generate.
Georges Perec in W ou le souvenir d'enfance describes a period in
his life when he lived without a thought of his past: 'Il y avait plus de
pass, et pendant trs longtemps il n'y eut pas non plus d'avenir;
simplement a durait. On tait l' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p.
94).26 Forgetting induces a feeling of timelessness and the sensation
Hellman expresses of losing a sense of identity. Maurice Halbwachs
25 Lillian Hellman, Maybe: A Story (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 42.

(Hereafter quoted in the text.)
26 'There was no past, and for very many years there was no future either;
things simply went on. You were there.' p. 69.
in his study of memory makes an interesting point when, discussing

aphasia, he claims that: 'In less severe cases of aphasia the patients,
because they cannot tell of their past owing to their lack of words [.
. .] are likely to maintain only a vague sense of time, persons, and
places.'27 In this sphere of forgetting, then, where there is only 'now',
writing is almost impossible. But, although forgetting can therefore be
seen as anathema to autobiography, it is often a fertile ground, even a
starting point for autobiographical writing. As Perec explains in his
foreword the point of departure for the whole book is 'ces points de
suspension auxquels se sont accrochs les fils rompus de l'enfance et
la trame de l'criture'.28 We can see in this how writing, memory and
forgetting are all inextricably linked in the autobiographical process.
Not only can forgetting influence the whole structure of the text, it can
also be the very reason for starting to write, as an attempt to retrieve
what has been lost.
The first fictional part of W ou le souvenir d'enfance describes a
quest, and autobiography can be seen as a quest for the forgotten or
the half-remembered, a quest that always remains partly unfulfilled.
At the start of the first chapter of his childhood memories Perec says:
'Je n'ai pas de souvenirs d'enfance': je posais cette

affirmation avec assurance, avec presque une sorte de dfi.
L'on n'avait pas m'interroger sur cette question. Elle
n'tait pas inscrite mon programme. J'en tais dispens:
une autre histoire, la Grande, l'Histoire avec sa grande
hache, avait dj rpondu ma place: la guerre, les camps.
(W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 13)29
27 Halbwachs, op. cit., p. 45.

28 'the points of suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and
the web of writing are caught.' Preface, no page number.
29 '"I have no childhood memories": I made this assertion with confidence,
with almost a kind of defiance. It was nobody's business to press me on this
question. It was not a set topic on my syllabus. I was excused: a different
history, History with a capital H, had answered the question in my stead: the
war, the camps.' p. 6.
36 Borderlines
Public history and memory have here replaced the need for personal
or private remembrance. The personal has been forgotten in the
terrifying History with a capital H. His childhood memories seem
redundant in comparison. But with this autobiography Perec attempts
to come to terms with, and to accept the importance of, his private
memories. He has decided not to forget. And to accept that even
though he has forgotten much about his parents, he still remembers
being a shadow among their shadows.
Throughout her autobiographical works Hellman writes and rewrites
the past. She frequently expresses doubts about her memory as she
says that 'the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted'
(Pentimento, p. 412). What characterises her work is her constant
doubt about her own memory, her rewriting and comments on her
own diaries, and a reappraisal of the past, both her own and other
people's actions. As I mentioned above Hellman adds notes to the
Three edition and in the introduction to that volume she writes:
What didn't I see during the time of work that I now see
more clearly? [. . .] Or what did I see in the past that I could
not now duplicate? [. . .] Or maybe just the act of writing it
down, then and then only, turned it into the past, and
nothing can or will bring it back.30
This leads to another connection between writing and forgetting.

Writing an autobiography entails choosing some memories and
discarding others. More than that, it also means choosing a form for
these memories, a narrative structure. In doing so the autobiographer
consciously forgets (if that is possible) other interpretations of the
same event, other memories that might contradict the one he or she
writes about. If remembering is being present to something that was
earlier, 'the act of writing it down turns it into the past' and the past is
irretrievable.
In both Perec's and Hellman's works there are quite obvious
instances of editing. Both add notes to earlier texts, correct, explain or
give more detail. They leave these examples of editing there, and do
30 Lillian Hellman, 'On Reading Again', in Three, pp. 3-11, p. 4.

not rewrite once more to be rid of them. One may think that what the
autobiographer has forgotten simply is not there, but sometimes what
is forgotten is a part of the memory he or she is writing on. It is in
what I call here 'editing' that the presence of the forgotten is most
obvious. Perec's text is riddled with footnotes, corrections and gaps.
His memories are practically non-existent, or at least implausible,
supported by very little evidence, and they need to be conjured up.
David Bellos believes that this absence is central to all of Perec's
work:
[it] is explicitly built on nothing, on the absence that lies at

the heart of language, and which is the truest expression of
the self. Perec described himself as being like a child who
does not know what he wants or fears the most: to stay
hidden, or to be found. In fact, there is no tension in Perec's
work between self-affirmation and denial. What he
achieved through intense reflection on the writer's material
[. . .] is the paradoxical assertion of the self by the
conscious construction of its absence.31
There is a constant movement in the text between what Perec

remembers and what really happened. He tells us of a memory and
then withdraws it or corrects it. There is a sense in which these gaps,
these false memories are important to his sense of identity even
though they may be false. Occasionally he discovers that what he
believed had happened to him really happened to someone else. But
the reader is still left in doubt which of the two, the original memory
or the later version, is true.
So in a sense the editing offers only another version, not a 'truer'
version. It adds more layers to the original childhood memory, so the
past becomes ever more obscure. As Philippe Lejeune points out:
The whole of the childhood memory part seems to have

been written to disappoint the specific horizon of the
'childhood memories' genre [. . .] He refuses to write
31 David Bellos, 'The Old and the New: An Introduction to Georges Perec',
Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 8-17, (p. 13).
38 Borderlines
decoratively in any way, to embellish the memory or to

make it echo. The narrator is a hypercritical presence in the
text, pinning down mistakes, approximations, elaborations,
stripping memories bare, questioning them like an
inquisitor, blinding them with spotlights of truth.32
One could say that the awareness of the elusiveness of memory, the
presence of the forgotten, causes a constant questioning in the texts, 'a
hypercritical presence' that is apparent to a greater or lesser degree in
most autobiographies. Fiction is, of course, a good device to gloss
over memory lapses. But that is not the role of the fictional chapters in
Perec's text, or if it is, it is in a much more subtle way than we usually
presume. He does not fill in memory lapses and make up stories.
Instead he includes a horrific fictional tale of a fascist society. The
process of editing is made so apparent that it becomes an obstacle
course in the chapters on childhood memories but it is nowhere
evident (or is at least discreet) in the fictional tale. As Lejeune
describes it: 'The ever-obstructed path of memory stands in contrast to
the smooth slope of the fiction into nightmare.'33
The second fictional part in W ou le souvenir d'enfance is a story of
an island society that is completely centred on sport, a story that grew
out of one Perec made up as a child. In fascist societies, memory must
be controlled. The state controls what knowledge, or memory, is
passed down the generations. The children in W have no idea what
kind of life awaits them. They think it is glamorous and exciting until
they are brought into the adult world and are broken down. The only
memory that survives is the legacies of great athletes that give their
name to the victors in their sport. Lejeune quotes the version of the
story of W published in La Quinzaine littraire: 'the reader opens it to
find episode 7 of Perec's bizarre serial, and lights upon an
announcement worthy of Dante. Not 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter,'
but 'Abandon all memory.''34 It brings us back to the political
implications of forgetting that both Hellman and Perec draw to our
32 Lejeune, op. cit., p. 91.

33 Ibid., p. 92.
34 La Quinzain littraire no. 87 quoted in Lejeune, op. cit., p. 94.
attention. To abandon all memory is to be lost in time, not only

without a past, but also without a future. When there is only one way
of living, one goal for everyone, when there is so much destruction,
individual needs and thoughts are superfluous and so is memory.
Perhaps that is why Perec writes on his memories, to assert that he has
a past. He survived the Holocaust so he has 'no alternative' but to
write, to remember.
Peter Burke in his essay 'History as Social Memory' addresses the
question of the politics of forgetting:
It is often said that history is written by the victors. It might

also be said that history is forgotten by the victors. They
can afford to forget, while the losers are unable to accept
what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive
it, and reflect how different it might have been.35
Both Hellman and Perec engage in this process of remembering. They

cannot afford to forget, both on a public and a private level. Perec's
text is an experiment in writing on what has been forgotten. And
Hellman continued to rewrite her life, remembering and forgetting in
writing for most of her adult life.
Perec's text crosses large gaps and blanks in his memory. This is
most notable in what he writes on his parents. This passage in W ou le
souvenir d'enfance might give some idea why he writes on things that
he believes he has forgotten:
Mme si je n'ai pour tayer mes souvenirs improbables que

le secours de photos jaunies, de tmoignages rares et de
documents drisoires, je n'ai pas d'autre choix que
d'voquer ce que trop longtemps j'ai nomm l'irrvocable;
ce qui fut, ce qui s'arrta, ce qui fut cltur: ce qui fut, sans
doute, pour aujourd'hui ne plus tre, mais ce qui fut aussi
35 Peter Burke, 'History as Social Memory', in Memory: History, Culture

and the Mind, pp. 97-113, p. 106.
40 Borderlines
pour que je sois encore. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, pp.

21-22)36
His memories are practically non-existent, or at least 'improbable',

supported by very little evidence, and they need to be conjured up.
There is a constant movement in the text between what he remembers
and what really happened.
Perec includes in his text two passages that he wrote on his parents
fifteen years earlier. He adds many footnotes that are mostly factual
corrections. He explains why he did not rewrite them:
Quinze ans aprs la rdaction de ces deux textes, il me

semble toujours que je ne pourrais que les rpter: quelle
que soit la prcision des dtails vrais ou faux que je
pourrais y ajouter, l'ironie, l'motion, la scheresse ou la
passion dont je pourrais les enrober, les fantasmes auxquels
je pourrais donner libre cours, les fabulations que je
pourrais dvelopper, quels que soient, aussi, les progrs que
j'ai pu faire depuis quinze ans dans l'exercice de l'criture, il
me semble que je ne parviendrai qu' un ressassement sans
issue. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 58)37
The story Perec tells ends in a loss: his parents' absence. Memory
cannot help since he hardly remembers them. The refusal to rewrite is
a confirmation of the absence of memory and of the loss he suffered.
This reaffirms the close relationship between memory and writing.
36 'Even if I have the help only of yellowing snapshots, a handful of

eyewitness accounts and a few paltry documents to prop up my implausible
memories, I have no alternative but to conjure up what for too many years I
called the irrevocable: the things that were, the things that stopped, the things
that were closed off - things that surely were and today are no longer, but
things that also were so that I may still be.' pp. 12-13.
37 'Fifteen years after drafting these two passages, it still seems to me that I
could do no more than repeat them: whether I added true or false details of
greater precision, whether I wrapped them in irony or emotion, rewrote them
curtly or passionately, whether I gave free rein to my fantasies or elaborated
more fictions, whether or not, moreover, I have made any advances in the
practice of writing, it seems to me that I would manage nothing more than a
reiteration of the same story, leading nowhere.' p. 41.
Perec shows us the process of writing childhood memories. They are

laid bare and so are his memory lapses. The reader does not get a
chance to get drawn into the story of his childhood as there are so
many versions of what happened.
As I have mentioned earlier memories can change meaning with
time or with something that happens to us later. Perec gives a very
poetic version of this. He remembers when his mother got him out of
Paris, wearing his arm in a sling (a memory which he later disputes)
and reading a magazine with a parachute on the cover:
Un triple trait parcourt ce souvenir: parachute, bras en

charpe, bandage herniaire: cela tient de la suspension, du
soutien, presque de la prothse. Pour tre, besoin d'tai.
Seize ans plus tard, en 1958, lorsque les hasards du service
militaire ont fait de moi un phemre parachutiste, je pus
lire, dans la minute mme du saut, un texte dchiffr de ce
souvenir: je fus prcipit dans le vide; tous les fils furent
rompus; je tombai, seul et sans soutien. Le parachute
s'ouvrit. La corolle se dploya, fragile et sr suspens avant
la chute matrise. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 77)38
It is as if Perec believes his past to be lost, 'tous les fils furent rompus',
and only much later he realises the 'fragile et sr suspens' that the past
offers in spite of the loss he suffered. As Theodore Plantinga claims:
'our memories are not inert but undergo a process of editing, whereby
they are regularized, rendered more retainable, and reshaped with an
eye to subsequent circumstances and events.'39 The past undergoes
38 'A triple theme runs through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it
suggests suspension, support, almost artificial limbs. To be, I need a prop.
Sixteen years later, in 1958, when, by chance, military service briefly made a
parachutist of me, I suddenly saw, in the very instant of jumping, one way of
deciphering the text of this memory: I was plunged into nothingness; all the
threads were broken; I fell, on my own, without any support. The parachute
opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile and firm suspense before the
controlled descent.' p. 55.
39 Theodore Plantinga, How Memory Shapes Narratives: A Philosophical
Essay on Redeeming the Past (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p.
45.
42 Borderlines
revision constantly through different periods in our lives and revision,

of course, is activated when people write on their past.
'The light behind' her and the difficulty in getting it to illuminate
properly past events is one of the themes of Hellman's
autobiographical works. The comments she adds are small additions
to the text and do not give completely different versions of events, as
is the case in Perec's text. Her questioning of the past is an integral
part of the text from the start. She doubts if she remembers things
correctly, she questions her analysis of events at the time and gives a
different perspective as she writes. She mentions doing research on
some of the people she writes about, but usually does not find out
anything new.
There is one person Hellman refuses to do research on, her long-time
partner Dashiell Hammett. She claims she does not want 'to be a book-
keeper of [her] own life' (An Unfinished Woman, p. 279). She does not
want to distance herself from her private life to that degree. It is the
fear of finding something that you do not want to find or finding
nothing. It is a refusal to be systematic and scientific in the most
private realm of your past. It is as if with objectivity and 'scientific
method' she would become a mere 'book-keeper' and not be able to
capture the 'truth'. There seem to be two types of 'truth' at work here:
on the one hand facts and dates, 'what really happened', but also
emotional truth, what this relationship meant to her. The same can be
said for Perec's 'false memories'. Even though he finds out that they
are false, they are still his memories and therefore at some level 'true'.
The prevalent impression the reader gets is that Hellman is not only
trying to explain her past to the reader but to herself as well. As if she
is constantly looking and searching for some truth or some incident
that could give meaning to her life in the autobiographical process.
Memory is her tool but it is not always comforting, sometimes she
moves 'near an edge'. Richard Poirier points out in his introduction to
Three:
[Hellman's] capacity in any given situation or conversation

to carry in her head and in her heart analogous moments
from the past and, perhaps as a consequence, to allow
positions she does not immediately share to have the last

word - it is this which helps make a positive virtue of that
'indecision and vagueness' which irritated one theatrical
director about her. 'Indecision and vagueness' is the sure
sign of her near total saturation in the always elusive,
random, sometimes resistant materials, including the
people, about which she writes.40
But it also seems to me that Hellman feels that she is running a risk by
questioning her own memory, by dwelling on things past, as she has
an extremely ambivalent relationship with the past. It is physically
demanding and a psychological turmoil for her to delve in the past,
trying all the time to come up with the 'truth', while at the same time
being aware that there is never one clean-cut version of events.
If Pentimento was controlled by unconscious memory, Maybe is
controlled by forgetting. Hellman claims not to know much about
Sarah and that she was of no importance in her life and she has
stopped searching for the truth and sense she tried so hard for in her
other works:
It goes without saying that in their memoirs people should

try to tell the truth as they see it or else what's the sense?
Maybe time blurs or changes things for them. But you try,
anyway. In the three memoir books I wrote, I tried very
hard for the truth. I did try, but here I don't know much of
what really happened and never tried to find out. In
addition to the ordinary deceptions that you and others
make in your life, time itself makes time fuzzy and meshes
truth with half truth. But I can't seem to say it right. I am
paying the penalty, I think, of a childish belief in absolutes,
perhaps an equally childish rejection of them all. I guess I
want to say how inattentive I was - most of us, I guess - the
whole damned stew [. . .] When I talk to myself I can say it
clear to me, about Sarah and other people, and places and
dates, but I cannot seem to sort it out here [. . .] What I
have written is the truth as I saw it, but the truth as I saw it,
of course, doesn't have much to do with the truth. It's as if I
have fitted parts of a picture puzzle and then a child
40 Richard Poirier, 'Introduction', in Three, pp. vii-xxv, p. xv.

44 Borderlines
overturned it and threw out some pieces. (Maybe, pp. 50-

52)
The story of Sarah is interspersed with passages like the above in

italics. What Hellman calls her childish belief in absolutes, her search
for truth, has gone and in these pages she charts something else;
people she has not mentioned in her other works, affairs she has not
written about before. Hellman and Sarah seem to have lived at times
parallel lives, seeing each other every few years and discovering they
have had affairs with the same men. In the book, therefore, Hellman
charts her sexual life to a certain extent by writing on Sarah. But many
things have been forgotten, truth has meshed with half-truth, pieces
from the puzzle are missing. The text is, therefore, full of blanks and
unclear anecdotes which seem to fit Sarah's character, as Hellman
describes how Sarah lied about most things in her life, even going as
far as to stage her own death to claim insurance money. So not only
does Hellman's memory play games with her, Sarah's life was so full
of deception it is well nigh impossible to make any sense of it. The
original deceptions, the passing of time, Hellman's rejection of
absolutes all serve to make this a fragmented portrait of an elusive
character.
The research so evident in Auster's text is literary, it is a search for
parallels, and not so much an examination of documents from his own
life. There is not a sense of turmoil or fight to recapture memories in
Auster, only a fight to preserve them and how best to do so in writing.
Auster sees forgetting not as the opposite of memory, but as a
necessary part of it. Seeing, remembering and writing are a continuous
process as he realises when he meets a French poet who describes in
exact detail a room he had seen only once many years earlier:
Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us,

but as proof of our life in the present. If a man is to be truly
present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of
himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in
order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the
power of memory. It is a way of living one's life so that
nothing is ever lost. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 138)
The only way to write and remember is therefore to forget oneself, as

only then can memory work freely. Areas of forgetting in
autobiography introduce gaps in the narrative and indicate doubts
about the power of memory. Forgetting informs the structure of
autobiography, it can be fertile ground for experimentation and the
public and private politics of forgetting are a powerful force. It
illustrates the problems autobiographers face in representing the past.
And it echoes Hellman's statement that 'the tales of former children
are seldom to be trusted', but also reminds us that we have little else to
lean on.
4. Remembering History: Private Memories and Public

Events
'You have a history,' she said, 'that you are

responsible to.'
'What do you mean by responsible to?'
'You're responsible to it. You're
answerable. You're required to try to make
sense of it. You owe it your complete
attention.'41
Remembering is not only a personal matter necessary for our sense

of identity and mental well-being, it is also a very public matter,
formed by social situations and often politically contentious. Our lives
are intricately and sometimes drastically linked to and/or inseparable
from what happens in the society we live in. And the same is true for
our memory: 'it is in society that people normally acquire their
memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize
their memories.'42 History plays an important part in Perec's W ou le
souvenir d'enfance. It is so strongly linked with his memories of his
own past that sometimes he cannot tell the two apart:
41 Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1998), p. 512.

46 Borderlines
Longtemps j'ai cru que c'tait le 7 mars 1936 qu'Hitler tait

entr en Pologne. Je me trompais, de date ou de pays, mais
au fond a n'avait pas une grande importance. Hitler tait
dj au pouvoir et les camps fonctionnaient trs bien [. . .]
Ce qui tait sr, c'est qu'avait dj commenc une histoire
qui, pour moi et tous les miens, allait bientt devenir vitale,
c'est--dire, le plus souvent, mortelle. (W ou le souvenir
d'enfance, pp. 31-32)43
Perec's life was so much formed by what happened to him during the
Second World War that he thinks it started the day he was born. It also
has to an extent replaced his own memories. Here the public and the
private spheres have become one. At the start of the first chapter of his
childhood memories he claims he did not have any childhood
memories, that History with a capital H had answered all his
questions. When events of this magnitude take place the private is
completely invaded by the public, and there does not seem to be any
room for private reminiscence. The reader is immediately made aware
of this relationship and the consequences for Perec's memory. But by
setting out to write on his childhood Perec is reiterating the
importance of the private memory.
W ou le souvenir d'enfance can be seen as an admission that perhaps
history after all did not answer all the questions. It seems that History
with a capital H still leaves room for the individual to assert himself
and his past. But Perec cannot do so without engaging with the history
as well, and his method is unique. Mixing his childhood memories
with a fictional tale of a fascist society, it addresses the question of
living without the private sphere; the individual, the family. The
dystopia is a powerful, frightening picture of a brutal society without
memory or history. In the childhood part Perec reinstates memory and
43 'For years I thought that Hitler had marched into Poland on 7 March 1936.
I was wrong, about the date or about the country, but that's of no real
importance. Hitler was already in power and the camps were working very
smoothly [. . .] What is certain is that a story had already begun, a history
which for me and all my people was soon to become a matter of life and for
the most part a matter of death.' p. 19.
history and puts the importance of the private and the individual back
in the picture. This use of fiction does not make Perec's account less
truthful, what it does is to allow him to address the real and almost
unsayable horror of those years and, by basing it on a story he wrote
as a child, he links it firmly to his childhood, to his origin. There is a
constant movement between the public and the private in this text, and
between public and private memory, as he remembers the medal torn
off him as perhaps being the physical memory of the star pinned on.
Here fiction plays a role in linking the public and the private; the
memory and the environment. Peter Burke talks about the
complexities of remembering and writing:
Remembering the past and writing about it no longer seem

the innocent activities they were once taken to be. Neither
memories nor histories seem objective any longer. In both
cases we are learning to take account of conscious or
unconscious selection, interpretation and distortion. In both
cases this selection, interpretation and distortion is socially
conditioned. It is not the work of individuals alone.44
There is a different dynamic between public and private memory in

Hellman's work. She is sometimes an eyewitness, and sometimes a
direct participant but her involvement usually stems from her political
affiliation. The tone is at once political and personal, as she charts her
own political beliefs through public events she still has not come to
terms with. What was for her, as for many others, the turning point
and what formed her political beliefs after that, was the Spanish Civil
War. She went to Spain as a journalist and includes in the text diaries
from the period, but still finds it hard to capture the significance of it
all. Her diaries from the time describe ordinary people she met in
extraordinary circumstances:
And yet and yet. My pieces here about Spain do not say all
or even much of what I wanted to say. I knew it when I first
wrote them, I knew it when I included them in this book,
and I knew it last week when I read them again. I wish I
44 Burke, op. cit., p. 98.

48 Borderlines
understood why. Somehow they do not include the passion

that I felt, my absolute conviction that when the Spanish
War was lost, we were all going to be caught in a storm of
murder and destruction in another, larger war. (An
Unfinished Woman, p. 129)
Negotiating the line between the private and the public proves
difficult, which is perhaps the reason why Hellman did not write on
her dealings with Senator McCarthy until her third work Scoundrel
Time. The passing of time has complicated the picture and in
Pentimento she says: 'I could not write a history of those years as it
seemed to us then' (Pentimento, p. 422). The McCarthy era is a
contentious issue in American politics. When Scoundrel Time was
published the Cold War was still at its peak and the divisions which
characterised that era were still as great as ever.
The prosecution of artists and intellectuals under the guise of
patriotism and Cold War scare-mongering managed to divide liberals
and left-wingers in the USA and ruined many careers in the
entertainment industry. Dashiell Hammett was sent to prison and
Hellman herself was called before the House Committee on Un-
American Activities and blacklisted. The committee found a new
concept to describe people like her, they were called 'premature anti-
fascists', a phrase designed to manipulate memory and history.
Hammett lost his health and Hellman her livelihood. But much more
was lost in those years and Hellman writes about that loss in
Scoundrel Time.
Hellman does not attempt any kind of objectivity in writing this
history. She directs her anger not at the politicians but at the
intellectuals and artists who did not stand up and protest but
collaborated with the politicians:
It is eccentric, I suppose, not to care much about the

persecutors and to care so much about those who allowed
the persecution, but it was as if I had been deprived of a
child's belief in tribal safety. I was never again to believe in
it and resent to this day that it has been taken from me. I
had only one way out, and that I took: to shut up about the
whole period. (Pentimento, p. 525)
But to shut up, forget, would be for her to admit defeat, so she writes a
highly personal account of her appearance before the House
Committee, describing her fears and emotions, including details on
what she drank, what she wore and her meetings with her lawyer
deciding on her strategy, which could have landed her in prison.
Hellman moves constantly between the political and historical to the
personal and private memories. A strategy that makes historians
uneasy and readers of autobiography suspicious. Hellman's main tool
in writing on the past are anecdotes. She has witnessed many
important events and met many powerful people, but what she tells us
are personal anecdotes of people and events, of little ordinary things
in the midst of the extraordinary. This anecdotal writing suffered
much derision from her political opponents when Scoundrel Time was
published, who accused her of political naivet and lack of admission
of her 'communist' past.45 This opposition to her writing is not only
the result of her far from conciliatory tone, her anger and criticism of
those who collaborated, but also because of her style: her peculiar
mixture of the personal and the political and the way her private
memories do not seem to support the collective memory of events.
Another reason for the difference in opinion towards the past is
explained by Halbwachs:
It is in this way that history does not limit itself to

reproducing a tale told by people contemporary with events
of the past, but rather refashions it from period to period
not only because of other testimony that has become
available, but also to adapt it to the mental habits and the
type of representation of the past common among
contemporaries.46
It is not only that different generations look at the past differently.

Time itself often changes people's perception of events. Hellman
45 A full account of the controversy surrounding the publication of

Scoundrel Time is given in Doris V. Falk's Lillian Hellman (New York:
Frederick Unger, 1978).
50 Borderlines
comments on this change in attitude in a footnote about her stay in

Moscow:
This was the word [easiest winter of the war] in 1944. In

1966, three Muscovites told me it had been that hardest
winter of the war. I think this conflict of memory came
about because in 1944 they knew they were on the way to
victory and an end. In 1966 they remember only the
deprivation and the misery. (An Unfinished Woman, p. 148)
It is clear from all this that people's attitudes and perceptions of the
past are very much formed by changing perceptions in society, by
whether they have lost or gained something, by the political climate
and, of course, personal experiences. There is a constant dialogue
between public and private memory, and each forms the other.
The difference between Perec's and Hellman's approaches to the
same period in history is influenced by their circumstances at the time.
Hellman was an American radical fighting fascism, while Perec was
only a child at the time who lost his family to fascism. There is a
sense of inevitability in Perec's text, while Hellman has in some ways
still not accepted what happened and still argues with the past. In
some ways she is also arguing with the present. She has very little use
for the morality of the politicians of the day. She describes the
attitudes in the middle of the Cold War: 'They condemn Vietnam, we
condemn Hungary. But the moral tone of giants with swollen heads,
fat fingers pressed over the atom bomb, staring at each other across
the forests of the world, is monstrously comic' (An Unfinished
Woman, p. 189). Places, people and political events all provide
Hellman with material to question, doubt, criticise and explain the
past. Her kind of liberalism has failed, she believes, and she does not
believe in any other political system. But she is still relentless in her
quest for answers. She feels the need to communicate what she once
believed in so that the reader is not quite convinced that she has
completely lost the need for what she calls 'truth'.
Halbwachs explains this dialogue between the public and the private
thus: 'On peut dire aussi bien que l'individu se souvient en se plaant
au point de vue du groupe, et que la mmoire du groupe se ralise et
se manifeste dans les mmoires individuelles.'47 History impinges in

this way on Auster's memory. The connections he makes are not only
to other writers, but to Jewish history. There is an underlying
awareness that his story might have been very different, or more to the
point might not have been at all. His part of the Auster family left
Eastern Europe in the early years of this century, whereas another part
of the family went to Israel (he mentions one Auster who became
mayor of Jerusalem), but some stayed. This sense of history is always
there, just under the surface. But his sense of the link between public
and private memory is a rather idiosyncratic one:
As he sat through those long summer days in his

grandfather's apartment, he began to see that the power of
baseball was for him the power of memory. Memory in
both senses of the word: as a catalyst for remembering his
own life and as an artificial structure for ordering the
historical past. 1960, for example, was the year Kennedy
was elected president; it was also the year of A.'s Bar
Mitzvah, the year he supposedly reached manhood. But the
first image that springs to his mind when 1960 is mentioned
is Bill Mazeroski's homerun that beat the Yankees in the
World Series. He can still see the ball soaring over the
Forbes Field fence - that high, dark barrier, so densely
cluttered with white numbers - and by recalling the
sensations of that moment, that abrupt and stunning instant
of pleasure, he is able to re-enter his own past, to stand in a
world that would otherwise be lost to him. (The Invention
of Solitude, p. 116)
It is a type of mnemonics that not only serves his own past, but also
his memory of public events. In Auster's writing these strands are
intricately linked and cannot be separated out, just as his memory is
linked to literature. Whenever he thinks of a time when his son
became gravely ill he thinks of Mallarm's poems on the death of his
47 Ibid., p. xi. 'One may say that the individual remembers by placing
himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the
memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories.' p.
40.
52 Borderlines
son, which Auster translated. And so his story is also linked to the
lives of those who perished.
In his autobiography Coming to Terms (1987) Henry F. May applies
the method of historical research when writing about his parents.48
There is the underlying notion in May's work that the two are
fundamentally different, so he completely separates personal
reminiscences and the 'history' of his parents. This is very different
from what happens in the works of Auster, Perec and Hellman. There,
through the individual's sense of the past, whether it is personal
reminiscences, fiction, diaries, comments or footnotes, the private
memory makes the public event its own.
Paul John Eakin examines the relationship between the historical
and personal in autobiography and in his discussion of Ernest
Hemingway's In Our Time he says that the lesson of the structure of
that work is that: 'private and public event equally belong to the fabric
of life 'in our time', for the convention by which we deem the two to
be separate and distinct is just that, a convention.'49 It is this
convention which these texts all challenge. These autobiographies
might not tell us very much about specific historical events but they
do shed light on the relationship between the individual and history in
their time.
5. The Quest for Memory
Memory is the subject of all three texts we have studied in this

chapter, and not just their driving force, whether it be the processes of
remembering Hellman describes, Perec's emphasis on the importance
of remembrance, or Auster's play with mnemonics. With their very
different structure and style these texts all offer insights into the
relationship between writing and memory. Hellman's doubts about her
48 Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History

(Berkeley: University Of California, 1987).
49 Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 141.
own memory and her questioning tone highlight the fact that memory
and the writing of memory are always conditioned by the passing of
time and our emotional connection to these memories. Her works
demonstrate that there is no one true absolute version of the past,
however much we would like to believe that there is. But her works
also leave us with a sense that the effort is worth it; that re-reading,
remembering again, seeing again will yield new insights, and that the
writing process is an integral part of this process of seeing again.
Perec's text is an example of writing as an act of memory. It is an
acknowledgement of the past, in his case an acknowledgement of loss,
and this writing of a loss. It is a text that renegotiates the border
between life-writing and fiction. Auster is very much attuned to this
border between fiction and life-writing. He claims to stay firmly on
the side of the 'real', but by making the connections he does, by virtue
of his literary and historical consciousness, he inevitably strays into
the realm of fiction, without ever becoming what one might call
'novelistic'.
These texts all show an awareness of the workings of the writing and
remembering processes, and that writing on the past is no more about
duplicating the past than remembering is. Both activities involve
reworking the past. This reworking requires imagination, but memory
can also be a starting point for creative writing, and as I tried to show
in the second section, so can forgetting. Gaps in the narrative - the
space where forgetting impinges on the writing - are an inevitable
feature of any text of remembrance. These areas of forgetting all point
to the fictional process at work in writing an autobiography. The
admission that things might have happened differently from what the
autobiographers remember, or might even have happened to someone
else, highlights the complex workings of memory and the
impossibility of rendering it straight into words, in some kind of free
flow of memory. The texts also demonstrate that remembering does
not happen in some splendid isolation. It is a process marked by our
surroundings and our society.
These texts show three very different ways of writing on the private
and the public: Hellman with her mixture of history and personal
anecdotes, Perec with a fictional tale and childhood memories, and
54 Borderlines
Auster in his method of connecting each of his own memories to other

texts or events, be they literary or historical. These attempts at
connecting the public and the private, show that autobiography can be
a fertile ground for writing on the individual and history, and that how
one views one's connection to public events can be a creative force in
life-writing.
Writing an autobiography constitutes one type of remembering:
ordering memory, and making it cohere. This means that not only will
the memories resonate with the writer but perhaps more importantly
with the reader. There are many different ways to achieve that,
whether it be the poignancy of Perec's gaps, the hesitations amid the
flood of many disparate memories in Hellman's works, or Auster's
connections and coincidences. But they all emphasise the importance
of remembering, and specifically remembering in writing, while at the
same time pointing out the difficulties that involves.
Memory and fiction can be looked on as two strands in
autobiographical writing that constantly negotiate the space of writing.
Fiction is in a way inherent to memory, as remembering constitutes a
continuing process that changes with time. Memory is always a
product of circumstances, experience, the passing of time, memory's
public aspects, its connection to other people, and the changing
perspective of the remembering self. Memory is the raison d'tre of
autobiography, so therefore one must conclude that the fictional
processes accentuated by Hellman, Perec, and Auster, are inherent to
the autobiographical process itself.
The need to remember, forget and tell is obvious in autobiography,
but how is it possible to structure one's many and varied memories
and vague recollections into a coherent text? In the next chapter I will
look at the role narrative structure plays in this process on the
borderline between autobiography and fiction. As Peter Brooks
explains memory is the 'key faculty in the capacity to perceive
relations of beginnings, middles, and ends through time, the shaping

power of narrative'.50
50 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 11.
Chapter Two
The Use of Narrative in Autobiography
Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski
Au dbut, je croyais que j'crirais vite. En fait
je passe beaucoup de temps m'interroger
sur l'ordre des choses dire, le choix et
l'agencement des mots, comme s'il existait un
ordre idal, seul capable de rendre une vrit
concernant ma mre - mais je ne sais pas en
quoi elle consiste - et rien d'autre ne compte
pour moi, au moment o j'cris, que la
dcouverte de cet ordre-l.1
Narrative gives form to what is unformed.2
1. Narrative and Knowledge
In this chapter I examine the role of narrative structure and narrative

organisation in the interplay between autobiography and fiction in
life-writing. I focus mainly on two autobiographical texts, Suzannah
Lessard's The Architect of Desire (1996) and Peter Handke's
Wunschloses Unglck (1972), as I believe they show two distinct
methods of dealing with narrative structure and are therefore pertinent
to this enquiry.
Lessard's text involves a complex ordering of events, and a
concentrated effort to use intricate narrative structures to tell a life and
1 Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1987), pp. 43-44.
'Initially, I thought I would find it easy to write. In actual fact, I spend a lot of
time reflecting on what I have to say and on the choice and sequence of
words, as if there existed only one immutable order which would convey the
truth about my mother (although what this truth involves I am unable to say).
When I am writing, the only thing that matters to me is to find that particular
order.' A Woman's Story, trans. Tanya Leslie (London, New York: Quartet
Books, 1990), pp. 32-33.
2 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin
and David Pellauer (Chicago, London: University of Chicao Press, 1984), p.
72.
58 Borderlines
family history. Lessard's work concentrates not only on her own life
but also on her family background. She tells of the lives of her great-
grandparents, grandparents, and parents, in between recounting her
own life story. The two central events of the book are firstly the story
of the murder of her great-grandfather, the architect Stanford White,
and the consequences that followed. The second event is her father's
sexual abuse of her and her sisters. The latter event is not revealed in
full until very late in the text, but the story of Stanford White's
murder, at the hands of a jealous husband, is told many times in
different ways and from various perspectives. I examine how
Lessard's use of narrative - her way of ordering events - produces
meaning, and how different temporal levels meet in the text. I look at
how she handles terms such as presence and absence, past and present,
silence and telling, in her autobiography and how that influences the
narrative structure.
The second section is concentrated on Handke's work. In this short
text Handke tells his mother's story, and how she came to take her
own life. Thus the text stands on the border between autobiography
and biography as Handke tells little of his own life.3 Throughout the
text there is evidence of a strong suspicion of narrative, a critical
distance from it, and a belief that creating a narrative structure
inevitably involves a degree of fictionalisation of events. I look at how
this distrust affects the way Handke recounts the story of his mother,
and how he deals with the meaning-making process of narrative. It is
interesting to see how the text moves back and forth from a desire for
narrative to a refusal to let the flow of narrative take over. Handke's
mother came from rural Austria and Handke represents her in terms of
her social circumstances, and thereby questions about the interaction
between the public and the private, telling and explaining, inform the
text, and play a central role in Handke's use of narrative structure.
Narrative structure in autobiography can be seen as an attempt to
order the chaos and confusion that is life. This presupposes what
3 I have chosen this text despite it not being 'pure' autobiography and I
discuss in more detail this issue of the relationship between biography and
autobiography in chapter five.
The Use of Narrative in Autobiography 59
narrative theory has long maintained, that narrative is made up of two

elements: fabula and sjuzet or histoire and discours. In the case of
autobiography the fabula is comprised of the events of the life
recounted and the sjuzet is then the order - or form - in which the
events are recounted.4
The two quotations at the head of this chapter offer two different
versions of the way in which this ordering of events takes place.
Ernaux is looking for the order that she presumes to be already there.
She believes she only needs to find it, and she maintains that this
order will in itself bring forth the truth. Ricur's notion is that
narrative forms something that is unformed, transforming fabula into
sjuzet. Narrative involves the organisation of time; it establishes
causality and continuity and allocates meaning to events. The question
that is widely debated is whether narrative is tagged on after the event
or whether it is intrinsic to all knowledge and therefore of major
importance to one's sense of identity.5 Telling one's life is a basic
human practice and narrative is there to provide beginnings, middles
and ends as Peter Brooks points out:
4 See for instance Jonathan Culler's analysis of narrative theory in The

Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 169-170.
5 David Carr maintains: 'For if I am right in thinking that narrative structure
pervades our very experience of time and social existence, independently of
our contemplating the past as historians, then we shall have a way of
answering the charge that narrative is nothing but window-dressing or
packaging, something incidental to our knowledge of the past.' Time,
Narrative and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 9.
Hayden White also explains: 'To emplot real events as a story of a specific
kind (or as a mixture of stories of specific kinds) is to trope those events.
This is because stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a 'real' story.
Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a 'true' story,
this is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which
means, of course, that they can be 'true' only in a metaphorical sense and in
the sense in which a figure of speech can be true. Is this true enough?'
''Figuring the nature of the times deceased': Literary Theory and Historical
Writing', in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London:
Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-44, p. 27.
60 Borderlines
Narrative is one of the ways in which we speak, one of the

large categories in which we think. Plot is its thread of
design and its active shaping force, the product of our
refusal to allow temporality to be meaningless, our
stubborn insistence on making meaning in the world and in
our lives.6
Narrative structure is then of prime importance for the way in which

the autobiographer establishes causality and meaning in his or her life-
story.
One way of exploring the role of narrative organisation in
autobiography is to compare autobiographies with diaries. In the
preceding chapter I mentioned Lillian Hellman's use of diaries and her
dissatisfaction with the picture they gave of her past. She regards them
as incomplete and feels that they do not mention events or people that
she later came to regard as significant. The crux of the matter is that
the diary form lacks knowledge of the future much in the same way as
Paul Ricur's 'Chroniqueur Idal'.7 Retrospective knowledge is
necessary to establish a narrative, and it is a vital part of the meaning-
making process of narrative:
For whoever visits the birthplace of a famous person, this

site is meaningful or important only in light of subsequent
6 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 323.
7 'This Ideal Chronicler would be gifted with the faculty of being able to
give an instantaneous transcription of whatever happens, augmenting his
testimony in a purely additive and cumulative way as events are added to
events. In relation to this ideal of a complete and definitive description, the
historian's task would be merely to eliminate false sentences, to reestablish
any upset in the order of true sentences, and to add whatever is lacking in this
testimony.
The refutation of this hypothesis is simple. One class of descriptions is
missing from this absolute chronicle, the one precisely in terms of which an
event cannot be witnessed; that is, the whole truth concerning this event
cannot be known until after the fact and long after it has taken place. This is
just the sort of story only a historian can tell. In short, we have neglected to
equip the Ideal Chronicler with a knowledge of the future.' Time and
Narrative, vol. 1, p. 145.
events. In this sense, the category of significance lacks

meaning for the Ideal Chronicler, even though he is a
perfect witness.8
The problem for autobiography is that there is always a certain lack of

retrospective knowledge, as the subject is writing his or her own life
and the natural ending is therefore not available. Endings in
autobiography must then, in one sense, always seem incomplete, if not
arbitrary, and in the last section of this chapter I will look at how
Lessard and Handke deal with that problem. I also bring in a third
text, Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica (1997), which offers insight
into the connection between endings and the reader's expectations. I
attempt to throw light on the use of narrative structure in
autobiography and how it inevitably straddles the borderline between
fiction and autobiography, whether we believe narrative to be intrinsic
to knowledge or not. Writing an autobiography tends to raise the
question what type of knowledge the autobiographical process offers.
If we take Stendhal's and Rousseau's preambles to their respective
autobiographies at face value then Rousseau claims to write to show
us who he is, whereas Stendhal writes to discover himself.9 And in
one way or another autobiographers still wrestle with that question,
that is whether the process involves writers showing their lives to
others or to themselves, and here I examine the specific issues this
question raises in recent autobiographical writing.
2. Narrative as Organisation: Suzannah Lessard's The

Architect of Desire
As I mentioned in the introduction, Lessard's text takes place on

several different temporal levels. She tells of her own past, her great-
grandparents', grandparents', and parents' past and her present. All
8 Ibid., p. 146.
9 See for instance John Sturrock's discussion in his introduction to his
translation of Stendhal, The Life of Henri Brulard (London: Penguin, 1995),
pp. vii-xxvii, p. xviii.
62 Borderlines
these temporal levels interact in the text. Autobiography, of course,

always involves a meeting of at least two temporal levels; the past and
the present, hence Ricur's importance to our discussion. Not only
does Lessard's text recall the remembered past, but also the historical
past; that is, what happened before she was born. These different
temporal levels meet in the text in an ingenious way. The family
home, the large piece of land in upstate New York (simply called the
Place), which the family has owned for generations, and the houses on
it, most of which Stanford White built, where the four generations
have all lived, become the meeting point of generations and eras. Thus
space is used as an entity that stands outside time and grounds
Lessard's story firmly by giving it a unity of place.
A place is used to unite the generations, the distant past, recent past
and the present, and it is used as a vehicle for the telling of Lessard's
own life story. The chapters alternate between accounts of her family's
past and her own past. Stanford White's life takes up the majority of
chapters. His story is told from the viewpoint of his contemporaries,
from newspaper accounts, and from information gathered from
biographies of him. Lessard's grandparents' and parents' stories are
told from what Lessard remembers, from what they told her, and what
she finds out from their own written accounts, where they exist. She
moves from documents such as letters, photographs, memoirs, and
newspaper clippings, to White's architecture and to her own
memories: memories comprised both of images she remembers from
her youth and of stories she heard.
In between recounting the family history and her own life, Lessard
ruminates on how the family history influenced her life, on
architecture, on landscape, and on writing, and on how these four
important influences in her life connect and interact. She describes
how her grandmother (rather confusingly called Mama in the text)10
told stories:
10 Lessard's great-grandmother she calls Grandma, her grandparents Mama

and Papa, thus skipping one generation, as if she was her mother's sister,
blurring even more the sense of time passing on the Place. (The wording 'on
I would feel her presence and my presence in combination

deeply [. . .] she was apt to be thinking about an event of
the past that had come to mind, or perhaps about current
events: it was that she was present on a variety of levels[...]
In these instances, it was not what she said so much as the
ruminative way she said it and how that conjured up time
as a space in which one could move backward and forward,
rather than as a oneway, linear condition that was running
out. Or she might be thinking about Richard Nixon and the
Watergate fiasco. Or she would blend memories with
reflections on contemporary affairs, comparing the
experience of waltzing with a count in Vienna, for
example, with the popularity of the Beatles. At such times,
she seemed to float in her life - to be searching for the
continuousness of the historical line with that of her own
life, or for the continuousness of her life and mine, or for
the connection between public events and private life.11
This could just as well serve as a description for parts of Lessard's

text. She is searching for a continuum, a line that runs through the
generations and would explain the two tragic events she recounts;
Stanford White's murder and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her
father. She 'floats' in the family history, and in her own life, but has a
clear strategy; her moves backwards and forwards are not arbitrary.
She connects the public and the private in the story of White's murder,
his fame - or infamy - and his family, and she uses the Place to move
back and forth in time. Lessard explains how she feels connected to
past generations and feels their presence. She uses the Place as a
location where many temporal levels exist simultaneously and thereby
connects generations and events, making the causality she establishes
seem inevitable. This is Lessard's main tool for looking at more than
one generation, more than one temporal level. Using a place allows
the Place' is one that I take up after Lessard as 'the Place' denotes a large
piece of land.)
11 Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the
Stanford White Family (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 199. (Hereafter quoted in
the text.)
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her to travel in time freely, according to what her interpretations of her

family history dictate, rather than letting the chronology - and the
causality that implies - take over.
Autobiographers employ different strategies to travel in time. One
can for instance think of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984) where
Duras uses photographs to travel in time and differentiates between
temporal levels by using different pronouns. Margaret Forster in her
family history Hidden Lives (1995) uses a city to unite different
generations and descriptions of the cultural and social changes in the
city to illuminate women's lives. On another level, the level of
language, Frank McCourt tells of his Irish upbringing in Angela's
Ashes (1996), with prominent use of dialogue and thereby captures a
way of speaking in order to locate time and place.
Lessard uses architecture and landscape to forge connections
between people and events. But landscape is more than that to her, at
times it seems to stand in for her own story: 'the landscape [. . .] for a
long time would be what I remembered of my childhood - would
become what I thought of as my real life' (The Architect of Desire, p.
3). There is a constant oscillation between inner life and environment
in this text, landscape stands in for her memory of her inner life, and
architecture and a sense of place stand in for her family history.
Family history as architecture is the central metaphor of the text, as
Lessard explains early on:
I have come to see family history as similar to architecture

in certain ways. Like architecture, it is quiet. It en-
compasses, but does not necessarily demand attention[. . .]
Like architecture, too, family history can suddenly loom
into consciousness. For example, you can sit in the New
York Public Library at Forty-second Street - designed by
Carrere & Hastings, and perhaps the greatest building in
New York - with your nose in a book, or busy with the
catalogue and transactions with clerks, all the while
oblivious of the splendid interior around you. You can
forget it utterly, or perhaps not have noticed it at all that
day, and then, casually looking up, be astonished, even
momentarily disoriented by what you see. So it is with
family history. One can go about one's life with no thought
of the past, and then, as if waking from a dream, be

astonished to see that you are living within its enclosure.
(The Architect of Desire, p. 4)
Lessard's project involves describing things for the first time that have
remained hidden and with narrative cohesion give them meaning. The
power of family history lies, for her, in this absence/presence
dichotomy. Writing her autobiography puts the family history firmly
into view; she pays attention to what is around her and uses narrative
as a means to emulate the power family history has when it suddenly
'looms into consciousness'. Lessard uses architecture not only as a
metaphor for her relationship with her family history, she also
describes some of White's buildings in detail and looks to their style to
explain what happened to him and his family.
Buildings hold the past within them and Lessard claims to have
discovered the correlation between life on the Place and the
layeredness of time that can be seen in architecture at an early age. It
is when she visits Rome as a child that she discovers this metaphor,
and feels that it can represent her feelings about her own family
history:
it was the manifest layeredness of Rome and the

complexity of its imagery that empowered and awakened
me. Here, at last, was a metaphor that was the equal of my
situation. The confusion of different periods, sometimes
even in a puddingstone way - ruins growing out of the back
of the Pantheon - was profoundly satisfying. (The Architect
of Desire, p. 208)
Rome is full of traces of its own past and so it is with the Place, there
are traces there of other generations, other eras. On the Place there is a
sense in which time can slip; remnants of different eras live there side
by side in almost too close quarters, so it becomes difficult to
differentiate between the generations.12 Everywhere there are traces of
12 'In this atmosphere it didn't matter as much as it usually does whether a

person had died or not. Since people were embodied in the landscape, it was
easy to forget that a person had actually gone, and sometimes it seemed that
66 Borderlines
the past, so the present loses some of its primacy. The houses, the
gardens, the trees, the artwork, and the roads and pathways between
these points, all denote some event or person from the past. Parts of it
deteriorate to reveal older constructions underneath, all with their own
history and meaning. There is a sense in which Lessard's whole family
history is there, she only needs to look for it for the past to 'loom into
consciousness'.
This presence of the trace brings forth interesting questions about
presence and absence and reminds us of Ricur's notion of the trace:
Here is the heart of the paradox. On the one hand, the trace
is visible here and now, as a vestige, a mark. On the other
hand, there is a trace (or track) because 'earlier' a human
being or an animal passed this way. Something did
something. Even in language as we use it, the vestige or
mark 'indicates' the pastness of the passage, the earlier
occurence of the streak, the groove, without ' showing' or
bringing to appearance 'what' passed this way.13
people who were still alive had died long ago, because they had passed so
completely into the landscape that actually seeing them would have been a
shock. It was an easy step further - almost a matter of course - for me as a
child to experience the presence of people in the landscape who had died
before I was born. In a sense everybody in the community - dead or alive -
was both there in the landscape and not there, and it was perhaps this mixture
of presence and absence that made the landscape susceptible to suddenly
slipping out of ordinary time so that, for a moment, you would have no idea
what the date or the year was: for a moment it could be very long ago.
Anything could do it: a coincidence of angles, the light on a field, an
unexpected glimpse of the harbor through a scrim of oaks, and especially a
shift in sound, like wind rising - or falling - or crickets or birds falling silent.
In that slippage, it would seem that something was uncovered that was
always present but only out of mind.' The Architect of Desire, p. 42.
Sometimes these slippages are represented as ghostly: 'Ghostly overlappings
of history that undermine the primacy of the present are also common in New
York. Half-built buildings and buildings in a state of demolition are a part of
the cityscape always, so that what is there and what is not there can easily get
mixed up.' The Architect of Desire, p. 284.
13 Time and Narrative, vol. 3, p. 119.
The trace itself is present but reminds us of something that is absent,

something that is part of the past, but the trace cannot tell us exactly
what it is a trace of. Older generations are present on the Place both in
the younger generation's memories and the 'vestiges' or 'marks' they
left on the place. So even though different temporal levels meet on the
Place, thereby blurring the line between presence and absence, the
traces that have been left are clearly a part of the family's past,
although they linger on in the family's present. And in and of
themselves the traces do not tell the complete story.
Lessard's use of narrative structure reproduces this sense of temporal
experience - of past events influencing more recent events - as she
juxtaposes her own story with that of her ancestors, chapter by
chapter, and as she moves backward and forward in time, while
staying in the same place. The text is layered in the same way as the
buildings and ruins in Rome, and in the same manner as the
generations have left their mark on the Place. Ricur claims that:
what is ultimately at stake in the case of the structural

identity of the narrative function as well as in that of the
truth claim of every narrative work, is the temporal
character of human experience. The world unfolded by
every narrative work is always a temporal world. Or, as will
often be repeated in the course of this study: time becomes
human time to the extent that it is organized after the
manner of narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the
extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.14
The temporal experience described in Lessard's text is one where

many temporal levels connect and influence each other. The narrative
structure mirrors this by alternating historical past, remembered past,
and the present, in an effort to give meaning to the connections
between the temporal levels and to explain the events described in
relation to each other. Stanford White's life and death is the primal
scene in Lessard's text that explains and predicts the life of the family
- both its past and its present. Lessard emphasises the significance of

68 Borderlines
White's life by constantly referring back to him, and by including

chapters on him in between chapters about herself and other people in
her family.
But White's story remained almost completely outside her
experience during her childhood and that is another reason why the
Place seems to exist in a kind of timelessness, with its blurred borders
between the past and the present, simultaneously denoting absence
and presence. This, Lessard explains, is a result of the silence that
shrouded her family history:
there was for me a correlation between the architecture of

my family history and my inner life. In both something was
hidden. In the beautiful environment of the family past,
there was a magnificent figure who had gone out of control
in ways destructive to those on his course - including his
family - and ultimately to himself. Behind my memories of
a blissful childhood in a beautiful place, there were also
destructive forces that were blind and out of control, but
unacknowledged. Yet to this inner truth and all its
ramifications I had no access. This was the great role of
family history to me. It made my hidden experience
resonate, and by so doing delivered to me a whole self.
The main source for this silence is White's murder, and the scandals
that came to light after his death. The family had decided to say
nothing about those events and remained silent for a long time. The
destructive, unacknowledged forces remained hidden, and therefore
outside time and history.
Even at the intersections where Lessard's remembered past and
White's life meet, there is silence:
Stanford remained a living part of our history through the

large presence on the Place of Grandma. Stanford was
murdered in 1906, and I was born in 1944, but Grandma
White lived on until 1950; we overlapped for six years, I
can feel even now that my great-grandmother loved me.
It is, perhaps, indicative of how deeply that history was
muffled in silence that Grandma, who embodies the history,
was oddly without narrative in our family life. If she had

had a 'story' - even a girlhood story - it would have led too
easily to the story of Stanford, in an unravelling way. (The
Architect of Desire, pp. 38-39)15
The family resists narrative, it maintains its silence, and Stanford

White's presence is denied. He is nevertheless a living part of their
history because of Grandma (who is in fact Lessard's great-
grandmother), yet despite this he remains outside the family narrative.
His presence is also felt in that he built most of the houses on the
Place.16 The stories of White's compulsive womanising and
complicated financial affairs remained hidden in the family legends.
He is present, yet absent, silenced, though reverberating through the
generations. Lessard explains his life not only in terms of her family
history but in terms of White's Beaux-Arts architecture. The story of
her great-grandfather's murder is the starting point for this text and
everything refers back to it. It is as if Lessard is reclaiming the story
of Stanford White, and attempting a resolution to that story by writing
her own version.
15 Ricur explains what happens when historical past and remembered past
meet: 'An ancestor's memory partly intersects with his descendants'
memories, and his intersection is produced in a common present that itself
can present every possible degree, from intimacy of a we-relationship to the
anonymity of a newspaper clipping. In this way, a bridge is constructed
between the historical past and memory by the ancestral narrative that serves
as a relay station for memory directed to the historical past, conceived of as
the time of people now dead and the time before my own birth.' Time and
Narrative, vol. 3, p. 114.
16 'There were nodes on the Place - a temple in a laurel wood, a statue
among pines on a hill - connected, either explicitly, by roads and pathways,
or implicitly, by the way they were placed in relation to each other. The
harmony and symmetry and the balanced interrelation of spots created an
atmosphere of providential protection. This rationality and integration is
typical of Beaux-Arts design, in which the landscape is an extension of the
architecture and the smallest detail is connected to the vision of the whole.
Thus, the silence notwithstanding, there was hardly a spot on the Place in
which Stanford was not present.' The Architect of Desire, pp. 2-3.
70 Borderlines
But the silence in the family does not stop at White's life, as her
father's abuse was also a 'destructive unacknowledged force' which
was not only kept hidden and silent for a long time, but is also mostly
kept hidden in the text until near the end. In that way the silence of her
family influences the structure of the narrative. Lessard describes the
silence that ruled their family home, the Red Cottage:
It can happen anywhere that an abrupt silence can develop

for no discernible reason - the crickets stop chirping or the
traffic ceases - and in that silence your ears seem to pop
and you momentarily forget not just the date but even what
your name is. The Red Cottage was in such an unmoored
stillness all the time. (The Architect of Desire, p. 20)
Silence is here represented as being without memory and outside time.

The silence that dominated the Place meant that time there passed
differently from how it passed in the outside world: 'Some of us born
into that sanctuary could not easily find our way into the open,
moving river of continuous time outside the family, into the world'
(The Architect of Desire, p. 115). So not only does Lessard's merging
of temporal levels serve the purpose of explaining the
interconnectedness of generations, it also points to the idea that
because of its silence, the family remained outside time.17
17 Beaux-Arts architecture is here used as a symbol of these silences, this

stillness, and this feeling of being outside time: 'But in the architecture itself,
especially in the interiors, there is a stillness that arises out of the
combinations of textures, often unusual and often in rich dark colors that are
altogether expressive, amounting to a form of personal presence that is
outside time; it is this stillness that is seductive. Sometimes the stillness
borders on eeriness because of the unstill context - the onrushing wave, the
destructiveness of the age - of which it is a part. But the architecture survives
its historical context, because the stillness in it is the stillness of fantasy and,
in that, is apart from history and the world. The true context of Stanford's
work is not high society or the imperial nation but a celestial dream, a dream
arising out of his own immersion - his drowning - in aesthetic delight. In his
interiors the onlooker drowns a little and becomes lost in the world too.' The
Architect of Desire, p. 129.
For some reason catastrophe never seems to register in the family.

Even when Lessard hears that her cousin William has raped her cousin
Pamela it still remains unregistered: 'like a fox killing rabbits in the
woods, it was somehow not a part of history. My knowledge of it
disappeared into the old family silence, in which the world appeared
unchanged in a nitroglycerine air' (The Architect of Desire, p. 335).
Being outside time is to be outside history, and thus to exist without
narrative. Lessard's text breaks that silence, both by telling the
family's story and by her ruminations on the meaning of that silence,
both on what caused it and what effect it had. Thus the story of
Stanford White's murder and how it influenced the family, and the
story of her father, become part of history when the silence is broken,
and what consequences it had marks the structure of the text.
The story of Stanford White's murder is told repeatedly throughout
the text from different viewpoints. It is told through newspaper
clippings; from his son's viewpoint; from a biographer's viewpoint;
even from White's viewpoint; and that of the murderer's wife. It is told
with the story of the trial, and once more with the story of the funeral.
It is repeated again and again to show how it influenced many people
in many different ways. And as Lessard claims at one point, while
breaking the silence may not be that difficult, the art is in maintaining
that break. Here Brooks's account of repetitions is useful:
Repetition creates a return in the text, a doubling back. We

cannot say whether this return is a return to or a return of:
for instance, a return to origins or a return of the repressed.
Repetition through this ambiguity appears to suspend
temporal process, or rather, to subject it to an indeterminate
shuttling or oscillation that binds different moments
together as a middle that might turn forward or back. This
inescapable middle is suggestive of the demonic: repetition
and return are perverse and difficult, interrupting simple
movement forward.18
18 Brooks, op. cit., p. 100.

72 Borderlines
The repetition of the story of the murder means that Lessard maintains
the break of silence. It 'suspends temporal process' and thereby points
to the strange flow of time in the Stanford White family. It gathers
momentum in each telling, and constantly reminds the reader of the
significance she allocates to the event. Hence, White's demonic
presence is felt throughout the text.
The silence prevalent in the family meant that the relation between
environment and inner life became ever more closely knit, until
landscape replaces the narrative of Lessard's inner life. Landscape
'was a substitute for an interior to which I had no other means of
approach: it was a map of me' (The Architect of Desire, p. 244). It
echoes Lessard's main method for bringing narrative to her family.
She starts with an image; a photograph at the start of each chapter; or
a memory; or a description of a landscape or a piece of architecture,
and then moves on to explain the significance of that image.
A paragraph that is typical of this text - and I therefore quote at
length - is where Lessard tells of an image she remembers hearing
about. It was when her grandfather (called Papa or Larry) came home
in the middle of the night to tell his mother (Grandma or Bessie) about
his father's murder, and sat outside Grandma's door until she woke up,
so as not to disturb her sleep:
I used to search the picture of this vigil for the story of

Stanford and Bessie and Larry. I used to search the scene of
Papa sitting in a chair outside Grandma's door in the night
for the family story inside the public one which was so big
and yet elusive. Certainly there was drama in the fact of
Papa sitting there, containing the shock of the murder until
his mother woke. The picture perfectly captured the
selflessness in the form of good manners which structured
Papa's life - it captured Papa's character - but it also
suggested an imminent climax in which the pent-up truth of
Stanford's dangerous and destructive character, a hidden
family truth, would burst into the open with the news of his
violent death reaching Grandma. But that sense of
impending drama was forever unsatisfied, because my
sense of what happened next was that when Papa finally
spoke to his mother she took the news in a resigned way.
The idea that came down to me was that even Papa himself,
though he was in turmoil throughout the night, was not

completely surprised by what had happened either. My
impression of the moment when he told Grandma was of
calm, like the calm after a hurricane has passed and the
damage can be finally assessed. Over the years, that calm
translated into a strange indifference to Stanford's death. A
major figure in the family had been slain and yet about that
violent ending of an important life the family was numb.
That Stanford had been murdered did not seem to rate as a
story in the family. Certainly there was no resolution of the
terrible incident - none at all. (The Architect of Desire, pp.
214-215)
Lessard talks about the elusiveness of this image, and from that image
she makes her deductions; her 'sense of what happened'; 'the idea that
came down' to her; her 'impression' that her great-grandmother took
the news calmly, because that is the 'sense' of how the family received
the news, as the murder did not 'rate as a story' and was therefore
without 'resolution'. Lessard spins her own narrative out of images of
events which happened before she was born. The fact that it is
impossible for her to know exactly what happened is clearly
signposted. Her narrative is therefore not necessarily the only one, but
one that stands in strong relation to what happened before and after
Larry's vigil took place. This primal event that has not rated as a story
in the family comes to her first through the image, an image that she
attempts to bring to life, and to which she tries to give meaning
through narrative. The deductions she makes from this image - despite
her lack of first-hand knowledge of it - make sense in the overall
meaning she gives to her family history through her narrative. The
family's silence meant that the 'sense of impending drama remained
forever unsatisfied', but here Lessard attempts some form of resolution
by telling that family history.
The causality Lessard establishes between her family history and her
own story seems almost inevitable. The weight and significance she
gives to White's murder, how she reads into it a predetermined force
of destruction, she then translates into a destruction that runs in the
family, and therefore the sexual abuse she suffered seems almost
inevitable. The plot of the narrative thereby gives meaning to the
74 Borderlines
events in her life. As Brooks explains: 'Plot as a logic of narrative

would hence seem to be analogous to the syntax of meanings that are
temporally unfolded and recovered, meanings that cannot otherwise
be created or understood.'19 What Ricur calls 'narrative identity', as
Michael Sheringham explains, is thus established:
'L'identit narrative' does not reduplicate and externalize a

process inherent in consciousness: prior to the act of
narrative is only the need and demand for narrative
understanding, akin to the patient's need for the work of
analysis. Narrative identity is not the product of organic
unfolding based on passive intuitive understanding, but a
dynamic modelling process driven by active, constructive
processes at work in our engagement with the vestiges and
enigmas of temporal experience.20
The act of narrating itself is therefore of importance. The narrative

structure of Lessard's text is intimately bound up with her
understanding and interpretation of the family history. Lessard comes
to realise that the newspaper stories and the film that was made about
White's life, that her family always maintained to be a travesty, had
more truth in them than the family version of events: 'Ever so
minutely but with fatal significance, the cosmos shifted, and in that
moment I knew: it was the family melodrama about lies and betrayal,
and not the Hollywood one, that was untrue' (The Architect of Desire,
p. 77). The 'cosmos shifts' and Lessard attempts to build her own
picture of events, by telling a different narrative of events. But at the
same time she distances herself from her family - at least from her
family's version of events - as she believes that she has come closer to
the actual family truth.
It is not just that Lessard learns more about her family's past, it is
also that her ordering of events has come up with a different kind of
reality than the one that was accepted, silently, in the family. It is one
more indication of the importance of ordering the events of a life in
19 Ibid., p. 21.
20 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: From
order to create one's sense of identity. It is similar to Andrei

Codrescu's experience at the start of his autobiography America's
Shoes:
In the first chapter (of America's Shoes) the agent in charge

of my case is looking through my voluminous file. I see my
life passing through the policeman's eyes, arranged in an
order alien to me, alphabetized by offences and suspicions,
a life that resembles mine in all but the structure of the
narrative.21
The events can be the same, the facts all there, but the order is
different, and the events, therefore, look alien. The identity Lessard
represents is one that occurs in the writing process, it is dependent
upon the order she establishes, but as Sheringham notes:
Whatever the autobiographical goal, autobiographical

identity is the construct of intentions embedded in the
activity of narrative itself - the transfusions between
nonciation and nonc, documentary referentiality and
fictional speculation - and it is marked by an 'instabilit
principielle'. In Ricur's terms it remains a problem as
much as a solution.22
Lessard's blend of documents, gossip, speculation, and memories

inform the narrative structure of the work. Her handling of temporality
and causality brings forth her central point that when one finally
notices family history it can give one back one's whole self. The
family tree at the beginning of the book has served as the blueprint for
her narrative. The organisation and ordering of events, the continuity
of the plot and her use of metaphor all serve the same purpose: to
expose the layers of meaning in her family history and how it
21 Andrei Codrescu, 'Adding to My Life', in Autobiography and

Postmodernism, eds. Kathleen Ashley et. al. (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 21-30, p. 24.
22 Sheringham, op. cit., p. 27.
76 Borderlines
profoundly affected her life. Form and content constantly interact and
inform each other.
By keeping her final revelation for the end of the text, Lessard gives
the reader an inkling of the power that the revelation had in her life.
She meets her sisters one day at the request of one of them. She was
forty-four years old when they first acknowledged that the abuse had
taken place. Her sister Madeleine tells her story:
Her plain words were spoken calmly. But as she spoke I

had a sense of something like a sound barrier breaking, a
psychic reverberation that reached to the edge of the
cosmos and down to the subcellular level at the same time.
With it, the world cracked open. And inside was the world.
Lessard's whole project is to make, through narrative, something that

has been silent, outside history, become part of history. Her aim is to
break the 'sound barrier' and to examine the 'world cracked open'.
Being outside history in this text denotes being without consciousness,
and thereby without meaning, as the result of this revelation makes
clear to her:
A far more surprising and clearly direct consequence of our

meeting was that the very next day a paralysis that had
crippled my writing for years disappeared. Soon I
embarked on the narrative that has come to fruition here.
Another paradox of a story that turns on grace is that the
moment of grace is what makes it possible to tell the story
at all. Without that moment there would be no
consciousness, no understanding - no story therefore,
because there would be no one to tell it. (The Architect of
Desire, pp. 347-8)
Lessard's notion of godly grace adds another layer to her narrative

understanding. This - what she calls grace - is what lends her the
authority and also ensures an acceptance of the story. Lessard's
autobiography makes full use of the fictional conventions and the
narrative techniques at her disposal. There is clearly a strong belief,
that is emphasised throughout this text, that narrative is strongly
linked to knowledge, that without it there would be no consciousness,

no understanding. Lessard's interpretation of her family history is
clearly grounded in the way she tells her story. It is a tightly plotted
work, which experiments with chronology and causality, in order to
make sense of a life. By contrast, the Austrian writer Peter Handke is
much more ambivalent in his use of narrative and in the next section I
will look at how his ambiguity towards the explanatory powers of
narrative informs his text.
3. Avoiding Narrative: Peter Handke's Wunschloses

Unglck
Does narrative by its use of literary conventions always fictionalise,

and do people one writes about inevitably become types? And is that
something one needs to avoid, or can it be desirable and even be of
help in writing about tragic events? Handke voices these concerns
time and again in the text about his mother. The text is more in the
vein of biography than autobiography.23 Handke claims that he does
not want the narrative to take over, that he does not want his mother's
life and death to become an archetypal story and he chiefly blames
narrative conventions for constituting this danger. But at the same
time he voices a need, even a desire, for narrative to commemorate his
mother's life. This reflects the reasons why we tell stories in the first
place, as Ricur points out:
We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need

and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force
when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the
23 Handke wrote later other autobiographical essays: Versuch ber die

Mdigkeit (1989), Versuch ber die Jukebox (1990), and Versuch ber den
geglckten Tag (1991). It is interesting to note that Walter Benjamin also
uses this word Versuche (attempts or experiments) for the segments in his
autobiography Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987).
78 Borderlines
defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries

out for vengeance and calls for narrative.24
Handke's text is concentrated around a tale of suffering and the

necessity of telling that tale. The text is written shortly after Handke's
mother committed suicide (interestingly, she remains nameless), and it
tells of her life, and what lead to her death. Handke focuses, in the
main, on the environment she grew up in: rural Austria after the First
World War. He chronicles her circumstances, her marriage and
children, the implication being that a woman's life was (and in many
places still is) completely dependent upon her environment and the
men around her. It is clear from the start that the politics of the public
and the private play a part in this text. Suicide, as an action that is
performed privately but is at the same time public, inevitably
questions the borderlines between the public and the private. The story
begins with one of the few quotations in this text, the notice of his
mother's death. With this public announcement Handke immediately
sets the stage for a debate on the public and private aspects of
narrative by using the text from the newspaper rather than his own
words to announce his mother's death. This connection between the
public and the private is clearly of importance as very early on in the
text Handke recounts his reasons for writing about his mother:
Wenn ich schreibe, schreibe ich notwending von frher,

von etwas Ausgestandenem, zumindest fr die Zeit des
Schreibens. Ich beshftige mich literarish, wie auch sonst,
veruerlicht und versachlicht zu einer Erinnerungs- und
Formuliermaschine. Und ich schreibe die Geschichte
meiner Mutter, einmal, weil ich von ihr und wie es zu
ihrem Tod kam mehr zu wissen glaube als irgendein
fremder Interviewer, der diesen interessanten Selbst-
mordfall mit einer religisen, individualpsychologishen
oder soziologischen Traumdeutungstabelle wahrscheinlich
mhelos auflsen knnte, dann im eigenen Interesse, weil
ich auflebe wenn mir etwas zu tun gibt, und schlielich,
weil ich diesen FREITOD geradeso wie irgendeiner

auenstehener Interviewer, wenn auch auf andre Weise, zu

einem Fall machen mchte.25
Handke wants to have something to do, to keep busy, to write, to act

within the literary dimension, and activate his memory and the
formulating capacity of writing. He claims to want to do this because
he knows his mother better than anyone else, but he also wants to
view her from the outside, although differently from the way a
journalist or writer would. He states here that he wants to try to see his
mother's death as a 'case'. He does not claim that he will be objective,
as is clear when he calls her death a voluntary death rather than
suicide, and emphasises this by putting it in capital letters. This
tension between standing inside or outside, between the public and the
private, is evident throughout the text. It gives primacy to his inside
knowledge, but he uses the power of the literary to view things from
the outside. Handke voices a desire to make her story a 'case', possibly
to alleviate the pain, to distance himself from her suffering, but by
calling her death 'voluntary death' he already qualifies it, as it is a
word with much more positive connotations than the word 'suicide'.
This paragraph alerts the reader to the different aims, even at times
paradoxical aims, Handke voices in this text. He wants to be intimate
25 Peter Handke, Wunschloses Unglck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1974), pp. 10-11. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Ralph Mannheim's
English translation in footnotes.) 'When I write, I necessarily write about the
past, about something which, at least while I am writing, is behind me. As
usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and
transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine. I am
writing the story of my mother, first of all because I think I know more about
her and how she came to her death than any outside investigator who might,
with the help of a religious, psychological, or sociological guide to the
interpretation of dreams, arrive at a facile explanation of this interesting case
of suicide; but second in my own interest, because having something to do
brings me back to life; and lastly because, like an outside investigator, though
in a different way, I would like to represent this VOLUNTARY DEATH as
an exemplary case.' A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: A Life Story, trans. Ralph
Mannheim (London: Souvenir Press, 1976), p. 5.
80 Borderlines
and private, but at the same time he wants to view his mother from the
outside and to use the literary capacities he possesses.
By looking mainly at his mother's life in terms of her environment
Handke emphasises one of his central points in this work, that his
mother never had any choices, or any independence from others, or
any route out of her environment or her upbringing. The course of her
life was decided at her birth, when she was born into a very old-
fashioned and traditional, patriarchal, rural society. It is a narrative
almost without any possibilities, everything is already 'vorgesehen':
Keine Mglichkeit, alles schon vorgesehen: kleine

Schkereien, ein Kichern, eine kurze Fassungslosigkeit,
dann zum ersten Mal die fremde, gefate Miene, mit der
man schon wieder abzuhausen begann, die ersten Kinder,
ein bichen noch Dabeisein nach dem Hantieren in der
Kche, von Anfang an berhrtwerden, selber immer mehr
weghren, Selbstgesprche, dann schlecht auf den Beinen,
krampfadern, nur noch ein Murmeln im Schlaf,
Unterleibskrebs, und mit dem Tod ist die Vorsehung
schlielich erfllt. So hieen ja schon die Stationen einer
Kinderspiels, das in der Gegend von den Mdchen viel
gespielt wurde: Mde/Matt/Krank/ Schwerkrank/Tot.
(Wunschloses Unglck, p. 17)26
It is a life without possibilities; the outcome is already decided. There

is no dramatic tragedy here, only the grind of everyday living. This
paragraph encapsulates that kind of life as an everyday story - an
everywoman's story. His mother's life is reduced to a few lines of
kisses, cuddles, marriage, the kitchen, children, illness and death.
Handke reduces the tale even further to only a few words when he
26 'No possibilities, it was all settled in advance: a bit of flirtation, a few

giggles, brief bewilderment, then the alien, resigned look of a woman starting
to keep house again, the first children, a bit of togetherness after the kitchen
work, from the start not listened to, and in turn listening less and less, inner
monologues, trouble with her legs, varicose veins, mute except for mumbling
in her sleep, cancer of the womb, and finally, with death, destiny fulfilled.
The girls in our town used to play a game based on the stations in a woman's
life: Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead.' p. 10.
compares it to stations in a game that was played in his mother's area:

'Tired/Exhausted/Sick/Dying/Dead'. It reduces his mother's bleak
story to only a few situations, over which she had no control, and is
therefore almost without narrative, where death is only the long-
foreseen outcome.
But Handke emphasises by calling her suicide 'voluntary death' that
she in the end finally exercised her free will, it was almost the only
choice she made in her life. In the end she had a choice, although it
led to the same conclusion. Her life is time and again described in
these terms, as reducible to a few sentences, even to lists. Handke
describes her marriage that way:
Zu Untermiete in einem groen Zimmer in Berlin-Pankow,

der Mann, Straenbahn-Fahrer, trank, Straenbahn-
Schaffner, trank, Bcker, trank, die Frau ging immer wieder
mit dem inzwischen zweiten Kind zum Brotgeber und bat,
es noch einmal zu versuchen, die Allerweltsgeschichte.
(Wunschloses Unglck, p. 34)27
The story becomes universal, predictable, and repetitive. A woman

without choices, no chance of education, no destiny other than
marriage, and when the marriage fails in drink and depression, there is
no way out.
But Handke is not satisfied with this account of his mother. In
roughly the middle of the text he devotes four pages to ruminations on
the writing itself. He claims there are two main dangers in writing this
story: 'einmal das bloe Nacherzhlen, dann das schmerzlose
27 'They lived in a sublet in Berlin-Pankow. The husband worked as

streetcar motorman and drank, worked as a streetcar conductor and drank,
worked as a baker and drank. Taking with her her second child, who had
been born in the meantime, his wife went to see his employer and begged
him to give her husband one more chance, the old story.' p. 21. This
condition is described several times: 'Sie war also nichts geworden, konnte
auch nichts mehr werden, das hatten man ihr nicht einmal vorauszusagen
brauchen.' Wunschloses Unglck, p. 36. 'And she was nothing and never
would be anything; it was so obvious that there was no need of a forecast.' p.
22.
82 Borderlines
Verschwinden einer Person in poetischen Stzen' (Wunschloses

Unglck, p. 44).28 On the one hand there is the danger of simply
recounting events, on the other that the person will disappear in poetic
phrases. For Handke the facts are so overwhelming in their everyday
drabness that they leave nothing to think through or interpret. So he
moves from the facts to an attempt at formulating them, but when
formulating events from her life he feels removed from the facts, so
he constantly moves between the two, in an attempt to find a balance
between the unique story of his mother and a universal story of a
woman's life at the time. These four pages of meditations on the
writing of the text break up the narrative of his mother's life. It is as if
Handke feels the need to explain the problems he encounters in the
writing, as if the narrative itself could not. As the story moves
inexorably to the end, the writer intervenes to break up the relentless
flow of the narrative more and more often, to claim his mother's
uniqueness, and to emphasise the terrifying aspects of the story.
But the breaks in the narrative are evident from early on in the text.
They seem to serve the purpose of alerting the reader to the
inadequacies of the narrative. Its conclusion is so inevitable that the
narrative almost tells itself. Handke describes possible ways to begin
his mother's story:
Die Lust, jemandem davon zu erzhlen, heiterte mich

richtig auf. Es war ja so ein heller Tag; der Schnee; wir
aen Leberkndelsuppe; 'es begann mit . . .': wenn man so
zu erzhlen anfangen wrde, wre alles wie erfunden, man
wrde den Zuhrer oder den Leser nicht zu einer privaten
Teilnahme erpressen, sondern ihm eben nur eine recht
phantastische Geschichte vortragen. (Wunschloses Un-
glck, p. 12)29
28 'the danger of merely telling what happened and the danger of a human
individual becoming painlessly submerged in poetic sentences.' p. 28.
29 'The desire to tell someone about it cheered me up. It was such a bright
day; the snow; we were eating soup with liver dumplings; 'it began with... '; if
I started like this, it would all seem to be made up, I would not be exhorting
personal sympathy from my listener or reader, I would merely be telling him
a rather fantastic story.' p. 6.
The thought of telling someone excites him, but that excitement is

immediately countered with the inadequacy of the formulations.
Handke claims that if he were to begin by describing the day it
happened, formulating the story 'it all started with. . .' it would become
a fiction, he would not press the reader into a private participation but
only tell a fantastic story. Despite this statement he starts his mother's
story with 'it all began with . . .' (Wunschloses Unglck, p. 12). The
movement between his thoughts on the writing and the story he tells is
therefore an interesting one. He mentions again and again the dangers
and pitfalls he faces in writing this story, how formulating it can take
him away from the facts, while at the same time he uses these
formulations to tell the story. The reader is made conscious of the fact
that the story is always in some way a construction, made up of
literary conventions and modes.30 At the same time, there is a sense in
which there is no other way to tell this story - the facts of his mother's
life call for a certain type of narrative. As Ricur points out: 'If, in
fact, human action can be narrated, it is because it is always already
articulated by signs, rules, and norms. it is always already
symbolically mediated.'31
Although Handke claims to move between the facts and the
structuration of these facts, he seems in the final analysis to
acknowledge that the facts themselves carry within them a certain
type of narrative construction. This brings us to the problem of
divorcing fabula from sjuzet; in Peter Brooks's words: 'We must,
however recognize that the apparent priority of fabula to sjuzet is in
the nature of a mimetic illusion, in that the fabula - 'what really
happened' - is in fact a mental construction that the reader derives
30 Handke refuses to be consoled by form which Frank Kermode maintains

is possible: 'having found [form] you have a right to be consoled by it, for the
good reason that it is authentic, and reflects, however imperfectly, a universal
plot, an enchanting order of beginning, middle, and end.' The Sense of an
Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1967), p. 132.
84 Borderlines
from the sjuzet, which is all that he ever directly knows.'32 Or as Paul
John Eakin explains it in terms of autobiography: 'the problem of
structure in autobiography is a function of the relation between
experience and its representation in language, I would want to argue
that 'the picture' is an intrinsic part of 'the thing itself' and cannot be
separated out of it.'33
There is another aspect to Handke's treatment of narrative in this
text. Not only does he move between doubting the constructing
aspects of narrative, while at the same time using these formulations;
he also voices a need, or even a desire for writing and for narrative.34
As a lament to his mother's life and death, it answers a deep need to
commemorate, to tell, to avoid the silence that surrounded his sorrow
when he first heard of her death. Not only does he describe his own
need for writing on his mother, the importance and the need for telling
someone about oneself is also emphasised in the story of his mother.
He explains that in her environment one was not expected to talk
about oneself until: 'das Ich einem wahrhaftig fremder als ein Stck
vom Mond erschien' (Wunschloses Unglck, p. 51).35 And because
one was denied one's story and feelings, until they became alien to
oneself, people became shy like horses, withdrew and screamed inside
their houses (p. 52). It was only when his mother started reading that
she began to describe her own life:

33 Paul John Eakin, 'Narrative and Chronology as Structures of Reference
and the New Model Autobiographer', in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James
Olney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 32-41, p. 35.
34 'Es ist inzwischen fast sieben Wochen her, seit meine Mutter tot ist, und
ich mchte mich an die Arbeit machen, bevor das Bedrfnis, ber sie zu
schreiben, das bei der Beerdigung so stark war, sich in die stumpfsinnige
Sprachlosigkeit zurckverwandelt, mit der ich auf die Nachricht von dem
Selbstmord reagierte.' Wunschloses Unglck, p. 7. 'My mother has been dead
for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write
about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back
into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.'
p. 3.
35 'the word 'I' seemed stranger to the speaker himself than a chunk out of
the moon.' p. 33.
Sie las jedes Buch als beschreibung des eigenen Lebens,

lebte dabei auf; rckte mit dem Lesen zum ersten Mal mit
sich selber heraus; lernte, von sich zu reden; mit jedem
Buch fiel ihr mehr dazu ein. So erfuhr ich allmhlich etwas
von ihr. (Wunschloses Unglck, p. 67)36
Only then does Handke learn something about her, after her literary
experiences seem to give knowledge of fiction, something more than
the 'Allerweltsgeschichte'. Writing and telling are represented as
necessary and useful activities, it is the formulating that is represented
as a problem. Despite this need or desire, Handke again and again
tries to stem the flow of the narrative. When the story nears the time
of her death Handke explains: '(Ab jetzt mu ich aufpassen, da die
Geschichte nicht zu sehr sich selber erzhlt)' (Wunschloses Unglck,
p. 91).37 But as with many of his claims, it is one that is immediately
countered, as the narrative takes over and he recounts the story of her
death. Such paradoxes are also apparent in his attempts to capture his
mother's uniqueness. To be represented as a type, the result is
described as both desirable and repulsive: 'In einer solche
Beschreibung als Typ fhlte man sich auch von seiner eigenen
Geschichte befreit, weil man auch sich selber nur noch erlebte wie
unter dem ersten Blick eines erotisch taxierenden Fremden'
(Wunschloses Unglck, pp. 40-41).38
At the centre of the text is the feeling that this is a story the narrator
would rather not have to tell. It is both a lament and a eulogy, but one
without flourishes, embellishments or glorifying nostalgia after a life
lost. Rather it is a sparse, sorrowful account, which attempts to put off
36 'To her, every book was an account of her own life, and in reading she
came to life, for the first time, she came out of her shell; she learned to talk
about herself; and with each book she had more ideas on the subject. Little by
little, I learned something about her.' p. 44.
37 '(From this point on, I shall have to be careful to keep my story from
telling itself.)' p. 61.
38 'In thus becoming a type, she felt freed from her own history, because
now she saw herself through the eyes of a stranger making an erotic
appraisal.' pp. 25-6.
86 Borderlines
the terrible outcome, hence the reluctance to give in to narrative

conventions while at the same time attempting to fulfill the need to
'tell'. By constantly moving between trying to represent his mother as
an individual and telling a universal story, the central event, the
suicide, is represented as a terrifying event, but at the same time as an
inevitable end to her story. The type of narrative mode Handke
chooses is firmly tied to the explanation he gives. On the one hand it
is the only possible conclusion to her story, her only possible reaction,
on the other there is the horror of his mother's suicide. Her life is
viewed throughout in terms of its end. Every step in the narrative is a
step towards suicide. It is this crushing inevitability that is the most
powerful force in this short text.
This doubt of the possibilities of narrative is linked to the thought in
this work that his mother seems without identity. In his discussion of
Robert Musil, Ricur links these two notions, when he claims that in
the breakdown of narrative form is parallel to the characters' crisis of
identity. That it is not a coincidence that in contemporary
autobiographies, such as by Leiris, the narrative form is deliberatly
disjointed and comes to resemble another literary genre; the essay.39
It is this loss of identity of the character that corresponds to the loss
of configuration of narrative, and in particular a crisis of closure, that
one also sees in this text.40 The strictures put on his mother's life by
her environment, her lack of choice and possibilities, is represented by
a very simple chronological narrative structure. This short text has an
essayistic quality in a similar vein to Handke's later autobiographical
works. The strong sense of inevitability pervading this text translates
39 Ricoeur, Soi-mme comme un autre (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1990), p.

177.
40 As Linda Hutcheon also explains: 'Recently historiography, like much
postmodern theory and fiction, has concentrated its efforts on rendering
problematic the nature of narrative in particular. There are many reasons for
this focus, but Lyotard's postmodern questioning of the legitimacy and
legitimating power of narrative as a totalizing scheme of explanation is
certainly one of them.' A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1988), p. 55. This link I discuss in more detail in the
concluding chapter.
into a simple narrative structure and accompanied by doubts about the

possibilities of narrative to represent a life without diminishing that
life's uniqueness. Despite this feeling of inevitability, Handke does not
claim to have the authoritative, final word, or answer, to his mother's
story. From both Lessard's and Handke's texts we can gather that
narrative structure plays a large part in the meaning-making process in
autobiograhical writing. But how do they end their stories, and does
autobiography inherently pose problems for narrative endings?
4. Endings in Autobiography
Peter Brooks claims that 'if the motor of narrative is desire,

totalizing, building ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate
determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative desire is
ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end'.41 This desire for the end,
where the ultimate determinants of meaning lie, is inherently
problematic in autobiography. If as Walter Benjamin has proclaimed
'death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has
borrowed his authority from death',42 endings in autobiography must
always in some sense be based on contingency rather than authority as
the life that is narrated has not finished, except in exceptional
circumstances, such as the suicide note at the end of Stefan Schweig's
Die Welt von Gestern (1942). The autobiographer lacks knowledge of
the future and assumes the limited narrative powers of Ricur's 'Ideal
Chronicler'. Nevertheless, narrative in autobiography always builds
towards some kind of ending, albeit in some cases arbitrary or
inconclusive.43 As Barbara Herrnstein Smith points out:

42 Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai
Leskov', in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London:
Fontana, 1973), pp. 83-107, p. 93.
43 D. A. Miller maintains that such is the fate of narrative even in the
traditional novel: 'In the last analysis, what discontents the traditional novel is
its own condition of possibility. For the production of narrative - what we
called the narratable - is possible only within a logic of insufficiency,
88 Borderlines
It is easier to point to something that exists than to

something that does not; and the difficulty here is increased
by the fact that, like closure itself, closural failure is an
effect, a quality of the reader's experience - and one that is
particularly likely to vary among readers.44
As our discussion has demonstrated, in The Architect of Desire

Lessard attempts to make sense of her life and the life of her family
through narrative. She attempts a resolution to the terrible events that
were without narrative in her family. She literally re-writes her
family's history so it can encompass her own experience of it. But in
the last paragraph she claims:
Each one would write a history different from this one -

some so different that it might be hard to connect them at
all. I myself would write differently if I took on the task ten
years hence - it would already be slightly altered if I started
tomorrow. We live as irrevocably subjective in a changing
perspective of time. This history, like all histories, can only
be fathomed definitively by the true architect of desire,
whose intentions, even in constructing infernal
disequilibrium, and deferral, and traditional novelists typically desire worlds

of greater stability and wholeness than such a logic can intrinsically provide.
Moreover, the suspense that constitutes the narratable inevitably comes to
imply a suspensiveness of signification, so what is ultimately threatened is no
less than the possibility of a full or definitive meaning.' Narrative and its
Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 265. But Brooks maintains that we still
believe in the power of endings: 'If the past is to be read as present, it is a
curious present that we know to be past in relation to a future we know to be
already in place, already in wait for us to reach it. Perhaps we would do best
to speak of the anticipation of retrospection as our chief tool in making sense
of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic. We have no doubt forgone
eternal narrative ends, and even traditional nineteenth-century ends are
subject to self-conscious endgames, yet still we read in a spirit of confidence,
and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure
the provisional meanings of the already read.' Brooks, op. cit., p. 23.
44 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 211.
predicaments at the heart of our most tender relations, are,

we have to trust, to serve love. (The Architect of Desire, p.
354)
Lessard freely acknowledges that hers is not the authoritative version

of the family history; it can always be written differently, we are
always subject to the changing perspective of time. Nevertheless, her
narrative has reached an ending that mirrors the logic of the narrative
she tells. God, her true architect of desire, must in the end provide the
final meaning. The title, therefore, refers not only to Stanford White
and his destructive desires, but to a higher being who will in the end
provide the authority for this story. Lessard shows that the writing
itself is the goal in claiming that finally admitting to her father's abuse
meant that she gained some balance in her life and, more significantly
for our enquiry, that after the revelation she was finally able to write.
This is where narrative desire is realised; it is a product of the
resolution of her troubles and the expression of her troubles. It is the
breaking of the silence that shrouded her family, and in the process a
construction of her own narrative identity, that can be claimed to be
the 'ultimate determinant of meaning'. It therefore does not matter
significantly to this text that it could be written differently; Lessard
places the emphasis on the fact that it could be written at all. Writing
is where the beginning and ending meet, it is the reason for writing,
and where the narrative of her life ends in the text. The circular
structure of this argument (once writing is possible the writing starts
but the story ends) and Lessard's own narrative model for it work side
by side.45
In Brooks's discussion of Rousseau he claims:
In claiming the need to tout dire, Rousseau makes explicit

that the contradictions encountered in the attempt to
45 Brooks maintains: 'These arguments from the end are at least apparently
paradoxical, since narrative would seem to claim overt authority for its
origin, for a 'primal scene' from which - as from the scene of the crime in the
detective story 'reality' assumes narratability, the signifying chain is
established.' Brooks, op. cit., p. 96.
90 Borderlines
understand and present the self in all its truth provide a

powerful narrative machine. Any time one goes over a
moment of the past, the machine can be relied on to
produce more narrative - not only differing stories of the
past, but future scenarios and narratives of writing itself.
There is simply no end to narrative on this model, since
there is no 'solution' to the 'crime'.46
Lessard's text is in part a narrative of writing, a narrative of making

public what has been silenced. It opens up the possibility of narrative
and points to the fact that each has his own narrative that would be
different from the official family narrative. It is a denial of the claim
that there is only one true story of her life and her family's life. It is,
therefore, a logical and almost inevitable conclusion when she claims
that 'each one would write a history different from this one'. Each
moment of the past can produce more narratives.
The last sentence in Peter Handke's Wunschloses Unglck similarly
opens up the possibilities of more narratives when he claims: 'Spter
werde ich ber das alles Genaueres schreiben' (Wunschloses Unglck,
p. 105).47 Both Handke and Lessard keep alive the possibility that the
past can be written again and again, differently each time, although
Lessard's religious note - that there is some higher power which is the
definitive authority on all histories - is different from Handke's
apparently dissatisfied tone. His last sentence reveals a dissatisfaction
with his text, since it has only led to the inescapable conclusion of his
mother's death. It is a lament - the ending is always long foreseen -
rather than a narrative construction with surprises and revelations, and
essayistic in nature. His mother's suicide has closed possibilities, and
Handke's text reveals a compulsion towards one definitive account of
her life, constantly moving from the inevitability of the narrative to a
refusal of the generalised 'woman's life' tone of that narrative. His
claim that he will write more accurately on this later throws doubt on
the text we have just read. It enhances the feeling that has been
prevalent throughout the text, that the narrative he tells can never do
46 Ibid., p. 33.
47 'Someday I shall write about all this in greater detail.' p. 70.
justice to what happened to his mother. This inconclusive ending

nevertheless represents a logical movement within the text itself. As
Ricur points out:
An inconclusive ending suits a work that raises by design a

problem the author considers to be unsolvable. It is
nonetheless a deliberate and a concerted ending, which sets
in relief in a reflexive way the interminable character of the
theme of the whole work.48
Although one might presume the lack of closure in contemporary

autobiography to be a mark of non-fiction - as real life does not allow
neat closures - in reality one might say that this lack follows the
general trend in contemporary art and fiction. The endings to both
Lessard's and Handke's texts bring to the fore questions of time. Both
imply that with time their story would be different. Lessard makes that
clear with her sense of the changing perspective of time and Handke
voices a similar concern when he claims that later he will be able to be
more accurate. Endings in autobiography in general highlight another
aspect of time in autobiography as in some cases the time of the
writing and the time the events took place come together, as is the
case for instance in Lessard, Handke, and Paul Auster's The Invention
of Solitude. But in some the end of the narrative takes place long
before the time of the writing, as for instance in Vladimir Nabokov's
Speak, Memory (1967). So even if autobiography does pose problems
for endings, it is still possible to see patterns and configurations
common to many of them, and it is not sufficient to see the endings
simply as arbitrary.
The conclusions Lessard and Handke offer to their stories are not
completely arbitrary. They are, at least in part, inconclusive, though
this is more the case in Handke's text than in Lessard's. Lessard tries
to tie all the strands together, but she leaves much unspoken
(especially her parents' reactions to the revelations). She has chosen
her narrative strands carefully and selectively, there is no attempt to
48 Time and Narrative, vol. 2, p 22.

92 Borderlines
tell 'everything', which underlines the fact that there never can be any
complete, or definitive conclusion, which would mean there would be
a solution to the 'crime', a solution to a life, which Handke equally
resists. If there were such a solution we would have travelled not only
away from autobiography to fiction - since novelists have long since
been aware of the problematics of ending, perhaps especially
contemporary fiction, as for instance the alternative endings in John
Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) attest to - but we
would have travelled to the realm of fairy-tales and myth.
A recent text that raises interesting questions relevant to my
discussion of conclusions and solutions in autobiography, is Jenny
Diski's autobiography Skating to Antarctica. Diski tells the story of
her difficult childhood, her problems with depression from an early
age, and how she became estranged from her mother at the age of
fourteen, and had not seen or heard from her since. It was Diski's
daughter who in her late teens decided to search for her grandmother,
to at least find out whether she is still alive. That story is intertwined
with a tale of a trip Diski made to Antarctica during her daughter's
search. The first chapter is entitled 'Shrdinger's Mother'. As Diski
explains: 'For the most part, quantum theory has been of little practical
use in my life'49, but she goes on to replace Shrdinger's cat with her
mother. The cat in the box, according to the theory, can be both dead
and alive; it is only when it is observed that it is either/or. Keeping her
mother in this superposition of states suits Diski. As long as she does
not look, her mother is both dead and alive (p. 23), and can have no
influence over her life since she last saw her. This is the state her
mother remains in for the reader till the very end of the text. As
Kermode puts it:
it is possible to tell a story in such a way that the principal

object of the reader is to discover, by an interpretation of
clues, the answer to a problem posed at the outset. All other
49 Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica (London: Granta Books, 1998), p. 22.

considerations may be subordinated to this interpretative,

or, as I shall call it, hermeneutic activity.50
The text immediately engages the curiosity of the reader as the

problem Diski poses at the outset is fourfold: firstly whether her
mother is still alive; secondly will she be the same as Diski
remembers her; thirdly will Diski want to find out; and fourthly what
effect will this knowledge have on her. Even the dedication is
designed to get the reader interested and aware of the many possible
outcomes of this quest as Diski dedicates the book to her daughter
Chloe, 'without whom', leaving the sentence open and the outcome
unpredictable. This autobiographical text has, therefore, a very clear
goal, and works throughout towards some kind of conclusion. The
epigraph from Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies then serves to confuse
the reader: ''I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall
I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?'' Leaving the
reader with the sense that even though a conclusion might be reached,
it might not be as clear-cut as one assumes at the outset.
When her daughter first suggests looking for Diski's mother by
searching for a death certificate, Diski realises how easy (in practical
terms) it would have been to find out: 'Funny how easy and obvious it
was, and what a nonsense it made of 'I don't know if my mother is
alive or dead'' (Skating to Antarctica, p. 31). The reality of the easy
access to information and Diski's own reluctance to find out, to open
the lid, is a constant theme in this text. She has claimed throughout her
life not to care to know about her mother, not even being curious. This
highlights another strand in the text; what her psychoanalysts have
called her denial of her unconscious, a trait in herself that she
cherishes, as she claims to be a person who would always rather do
nothing than to be active. It also puts in stark relief the reader's
expectations of the outcome and Diski's own relative indifference. The
hermeneutic activity Kermode mentioned is thereby qualified by
Diski's reluctance to engage with her daughter's quest.
50 Kermode, op. cit., p. 179.

94 Borderlines
In the tale of Diski's trip to Antarctica being active or staying still

becomes a constant theme. She constantly wonders whether to go on
the day trips or stay in her cabin, as she discusses how 'being active' is
always assumed to be a positive thing. These doubts become a
metaphor for her satisfaction with her lack of knowledge about her
mother's whereabouts. It becomes apparent that the dedication is to be
taken literally, not simply in the usual 'emotional support' sense.
Without her daughter there would only have been inactivity, and the
whiteness and emptiness that she seeks so hard to find in Antarctica
(without ever finding it in the landscape, but only in her white cabin).
At the end of the first chapter her daughter has found a death
certificate of someone with at least a similar name to Diski's mother. It
still has not answered the question with any certainty, but Diski goes
on her Antarctic journey having realised that she will soon know the
truth. It is only in the very last pages that it is revealed that her mother
died in 1988. Diski describes finding papers that her daughter had left
for her when she gets back from her trip. But it is not her mother's
death that shocks her most, it is the fact that she had been alive for so
long after they lost contact:
It was is if the painting of my past had acquired a shadow, a

new presence, separate but lurking darkly around corners in
doorways [. . .] There had been the possibility all along up
to 1988, the retrospective possibility, that she might have
made contact; might, as in my worst early hours anxiety,
have turned up in my life. She hadn't; she might have.
(Skating to Antarctica, pp. 242-243)
The shock is to discover that when she looks she sees not only the
state of her mother as it is now (as in quantum theory), but what was
before, and all the 'retrospective possibilities' that offers. The power of
the might-have-been becomes almost tangible. This is, though, not the
only thing Chloe discovers. Chloe talks to her grandmother's
neighbours in Hove and soon the picture emerges of the same difficult
and troubled woman Diski remembers and avoided all this time. The
possibility that her mother might have been a 'nice old lady' has once
and for all been laid to rest and thereby some of Diski's feelings of
guilt. It serves as a confirmation for her own view of her childhood,

and that she would not have been able to have any kind of relationship
with her mother.
The last sentences in the book depict a dialogue between Diski and
her daughter. Her daughter asks if Diski is pleased that she (Chloe)
went to Hove to talk to the neighbours:
'Very. Very pleased. Thank you.'

'That's OK. Good to know about your mother at last, eh?'
'Mmm. Yes, I think it is.' (Skating to Antarctica, p. 250)
At least one of the questions posed at the outset has been answered.
Diski's mother is no longer in some 'superposition of states' but the
question remains whether it was worth knowing. Finding out has
changed some of Diski's perception of her own past, reinforced others.
The ending therefore echoes Brooks's view that: 'the tenuous, fictive,
arbitrary status of ends clearly speaks to and speaks of an altered
situation of plot, which no longer wishes to be seen as end
determined, moving toward full predication of the narrative sentence,
claiming a final plenitude of meaning.'51 Diski's text stands
somewhere in between. It does answer the central question, and by
leaving it to the very end, uses conventional narrative means to keep
the reader interested. But although the question whether her mother is
dead or alive might seem the most obviously important one, Diski
raises other questions throughout the text. That fact makes the reader
think of why we take the importance of the original question for
granted. Why is it better to act, rather than not to act? Why is it always
better to know? Therefore, although the ending is clearly not arbitrary,
it has lost some of its importance and weight by being constantly
questioned and its significance doubted throughout the text, so the text
does not acquire a 'final plenitude of meaning'.
One could say that in each of the texts discussed here the ending is
in keeping with the unfolding of the narrative. All these texts in one
way or another attempt an interpretation of a life. They all use

96 Borderlines
narrative conventions - whether it be with the relish and deftness of

Lessard, or with Handke's suspicious tone - to render that life. In
Lessard's case she investigates her family history in an attempt to
explain her past. Handke commemorates his mother, while at the same
time voicing doubts about the possibilities of such a task. And Diski
gets us to reconsider the outcome - the ending of a story - and with
that the idea that all problems and questions asked in the text will be
resolved by the ending.
It is clear from these texts that narrative structure is a meaning-
making process, establishing causality and continuity. Lessard finds
solace in this, while Handke is wary of imposing narrative causality
on something as complex and fragmented as a life story. There are
clearly conflicting attitudes towards the use of narrative in
autobiography in these texts. On the one hand there is Handke's fear
that the narrative structure will take over his mother's life, while at the
same time he constantly returns to this structure. On the other hand
Lessard's acknowledgement, that the story could have been told
differently, seems to imply that the same event can call for different
narratives, which contrasts with the sense in this text that her narrative
structure delivers true self-knowledge, and clearly serves for her as an
explanation of what happened in her family.
All the texts discussed here attest to the fact that autobiography can
offer a base from which to examine the role of narrative structure as a
meaning-making process. The ambivalence towards the possibilities
of narrative structure voiced in these texts shows that the question
whether or not narrative is intrinsic to knowledge is a preoccupation in
recent life-writing and that autobiographical writing has plenty of
scope for this kind of debate. The type of narrative structure and
organisation autobiographers choose is clearly linked to the
autobiographical identity they create. Doubts in these texts about the
causality narrative structure establishes reflect doubts about the
possibility of writing a definitive account of one's life and an
awareness of the fictional aspects of all narrative.
Chapter Three
Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical
Writing
Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal
From the first place of liquid darkness,
within the second place of air and light, I
set down the following record with its
mixture of fact and truths and memories of
truths and its direction always toward the
Third Place, where the starting point is
myth.1
To judge from recent trends in scholarly as

well as popular literature, three crucial
questions can be seen to stand at the
forefront of today's preoccupations: the
question of mothering, the question of the
woman writer, and the question of
autobiography.2
1. Introduction: Writing on Women's Autobiography
In this chapter I look at autobiographical texts by women writers

with the specific aim of seeing where and how the subject of gender
raises questions about the borderline between autobiography and
fiction. I have marked out two areas that I believe to be of special
relevance, namely accounts of how the authors became writers, and
how the autobiographers write on their relationship with the mother.
My central question is: how can gender illuminate or inflect the
relationship between autobiography and fiction? As always, my
approach is centred on how different facets of the autobiographical
text interact, in this case autobiography, gender, and fiction.
1 Janet Frame, To the Is-Land (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 9. (Hereafter

quoted in the text.)
2 Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1989), p. 144.
98 Borderlines
The texts examined here are Janet Frame's three works that form her
autobiographical trilogy To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table
(1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1984) and Marie Cardinal's
Les Mots pour le dire (1975). I examine how the authors structure
their autobiographies around the moment of becoming a writer and
around their relationship with their mothers. I will focus specifically
on how these themes manifest themselves in terms of their
relationship with language, how they engage with the question of
madness, and with feminist discourse. Frame's and Cardinal's texts are
of value to any such enquiry as both authors engage - in different
ways - with these issues, but other autobiographical works by women
are also pertinent to our discussion, specifically with reference to
fictionalisation of the themes of writing, madness, and the mother.
Janet Frame's 'Third Place' in the above quotation, can be seen as a
metaphor for the world of fiction and of special interest here is how
the women writers arrive at this 'third place' through writing on their
lives 'with their mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths'.
Writing on women's autobiographies has proliferated in the last
fifteen years or so. Theories on women's autobiographical writing
concentrate mainly on three areas: self-representation, questions of
identity (collective versus individual), and the public and the private
(male versus female). Patricia Meyer Spacks voices a view that is
prevalent in many of the earlier studies:
Women, for obvious social reasons, have traditionally had

more difficulty than men about making public claims of
their own importance. They have excelled in the writing of
diaries and journals, which require no such claims, more
than in the production of total works offering a coherent
interpretation of their experience.3
3 Patricia Meyer Spacks, 'Selves in Hiding', in Women's Autobiography:

Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980), pp. 112-132, p. 112. Other theorists have also pointed out how
writing an autobiography is a claim of authority and puts the marginalised
woman in the centre. Sidonie Smith explains: 'The mythologies of gender
conflate human and male figures of selfhood, aligning male selfhood with
culturally valued stories. Autobiography is itself one of the forms of selfhood
Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing 99
The central claim that diaries and journals are inherently a woman's
pursuit is problematic as are any claims that women's autobiographies
are inherently different from men's autobiographies. Such claims seem
to me to limit the study of autobiography and are not open to the many
possibilities life-writing offers; a mode of writing which has always
been a hybrid one. Many of the theorists claim that women's
autobiographies are more experimental; that women are bound to
question the genre more than male autobiographers.4 When describing
women's autobiography some of the theorists use words such as
fragmented, formless, anecdotal, disruptive, subversive,5 while others
point out that these words can also be used to describe
autobiographies by men and want to focus on other things such as the
importance of collective identity versus individualism in women's
writing.6 Felicity Nussbaum argues:
Women's autobiographies, [Jelinek] claims, are fragmented,

interrupted, formless, and even when basically linear are
anecdotal and disruptive. Such reasoning, however, fails to
account, on the one hand, for the large number of diaries
and journals written by men and, on the other hand, for
many women's autobiographies (such as conversion
narrative, for example) that display narrative closure - a
constituting the idea of man and in turn promoting that idea. Choosing to
write autobiography, therefore, she unmasks her transgressive desire for
cultural and literary authority' A Poetics of Women's Autobiography:
Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana
4 See for instance Shari Benstock, 'Authorizing the Autobiographical', in
The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical
Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), pp. 10-33.
5 E. C. Jelinek, 'Introduction: Women's Autobiography and the Male
Tradition', in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, pp. 1-20.
6 Susan Stanford Friedman, 'Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory
and Practice', in The Private Self, pp. 34-62.
100 Borderlines
beginning, middle and end, with an epiphanal moment of

crisis that reveals the full and transcendent self.7
This argument I believe to be valid, as I maintain that one has always

to be aware of the conventions of fiction deployed in autobiography
and how these conventions are not gender based, even though the
themes might be. When it comes to the question of the public and the
private most of the theorists repeat the same private/female versus
public/male binarism and claim that by writing an autobiography
women move the private into the sphere of the public,8 but this
ignores the fact that autobiography almost by definition moves the
private to the public. More to the point would be to say that
autobiography can be a potent tool for women's voices, as feminists
have long insisted on the politics of the private. Other theorists want
to focus on how women represent their individual lives in connection
with the cultural construction of the female.9 What is often blurred in
these discussions is the distinction between the text and the life, and
they sometimes fail to recognise the problematics of referentiality and
representation in autobiography.
I do not intend to study the texts in order to make claims about the
difference between women's and men's autobiographies but rather to
look at how feminist discourse is incorporated in individual texts and
how that can illuminate the complex relationship between
autobiography and fiction. Feminist theories have, of course, focused
on ideas on mothering and writing, and ideas about the mother and
writing are strongly linked with criture feminine. As Colette Hall
explains: 'The story of mother and daughter hidden in 'the depths of
literary texts' constitutes the inner structure upon which l'criture
7 Felicity A. Nussbaum, 'Eighteenth-Century Women's Autobiographical

Commonplaces', in The Private Self, pp. 147-171, p. 153.
8 See for instance Linda Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the
Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (London: Prentice Hall, Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1997), p. 12.
9 See Friedman, op. cit., p. 40.
fminine feeds itself.'10 I examine Frame's and Cardinal's texts in this

context, as both authors are preoccupied with writing and the mother.
But theories of criture feminine will not be specifically applied in
examining the structure of the texts, rather I aim to compare the
vocabulary of feminist discourse with the vocabulary of the
autobiographers. My aim here is not to look for specific examples of
criture feminine - which Morag Shiach explains with reference to
Hlne Cixous's ideas, claiming that it 'involves an exploration of the
subversive, and the political, possibilities of a writing practice that
sets itself up in opposition to such cultural categorization: a writing
practice that Cixous describes as 'feminine''11 - but rather to
investigate how ideas of the feminine are given shape in these
autobiographies.
The symbolism and myths surrounding mother-daughter
relationships are of interest here. In the first part I look at how the
authors grapple with the relationship with the mother. The writers
represent the mother as an obstacle on the way to self-representation
and they tend to define themselves against the mother. One can see
how the descriptions of the autobiographer's feelings toward her
mother follow a similar pattern: the mother is a constant presence;
then evokes repulsion or even hatred; and finally denotes an absence
of strong feelings or pity. Moreover, I am interested to see how this
pattern interacts with the descriptions of the start of a writing life, and
what that tells us about fiction in autobiography.
The second part is an examination of how women writers describe in
their autobiographies how, why, and when they became writers, and
how fictional strategies are used in these accounts. Becoming a writer,
in these texts, is usually linked with freedom from the mother, from
madness, and/or from traditional female roles. The pattern the
10 Colette Hall, 'L'Ecriture fminine and the Search for the Mother in the
Works of Violette Leduc and Marie Cardinal', in Women in French
Literature, ed. Michel Guggenheim (Saratoga, CAL: Amna Libri, 1988), pp.
231-238, p. 231. See also Marianne Hirsch, 'Mothers and Daughters', Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1981) 201-220 (p. 204).
11 Morag Shiach, Hlne Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London: Routledge,
1991), pp. 9-10.
102 Borderlines
accounts often follow can be described in terms of unhappiness,

struggle, or depression until they start writing. (This pattern is
reminiscent of the conversion narrative.) The move the writers
describe is from being defined by others (family, tradition, doctors) to
self-expression and liberation (an epiphany of some kind). I will focus
on how the writers represent this period in their lives and the role
gender has in that representation and what status this period has in the
autobiography as a whole.
2. On Words and Language
Janet Frame's autobiography is in three volumes, To the Is-Land, An

Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City. In trilogies it is
often the case that the middle part is the high point and the first and
third parts can be seen to serve as introduction and epilogue
respectively and Frame's trilogy is no exception. That in itself should
be enough to alert the reader to this autobiography's strong
engagement with conventions of fiction writing. For there to be a high
point the autobiographer must take an event in her life and give it, or
explain, the significance such high points need. The decisive event in
Frame's life, which constitutes the middle part of her autobiography, is
when she was declared insane and spent nine years of her life in and
out of mental institutions. The story of how this came about is told in
the first part of the second volume, An Angel at My Table, in four
chapters called '1945 One, Two, Three, and Four'. Frame does not
describe in any detail her stay in the mental homes, but places the
emphasis here on how she ended up there and how she eventually got
out.
The first volume describes Frame's childhood and the third volume
her life as a writer. The middle volume is in fact a condensed version
of the trilogy structure, as it recounts how Frame came to be sent to a
mental home and how she eventually managed to live outside them
and become a writer. Her struggle to become a writer runs through the
whole autobiography and reaches its high point in the last volume.
Frame's autobiography is a story of a woman losing and then very
slowly regaining control over her own life. The work describes a
process of being (wrongly) labelled by others and a liberation through
self-representation and writing. It is a story with a clear structure, a
logical progression from beginning, middle and end, nearly all of it
told in chronological order.
Frame hardly makes any references to the future in the first volume
which covers her childhood, though the stories she tells often
anticipate to some extent what will happen later. It is only when she
leaves childhood that she makes occasional references to the future, as
she explains at the end of the first volume:
adolescent time now became a whirlpool, and so the

memories do not arrange themselves to be observed and
written about, they whirl, propelled by a force beneath,
with different memories rising to the surface at different
times and thus denying the existence of a 'pure'
autobiography and confirming, for each moment, a separate
story accumulating to a million stories, all different and
with some memories forever staying beneath the surface.
(To the Is-Land, p. 161)
Frame still tells her story mostly in chronological order, but the reader
becomes more aware of the importance of the structure she gives her
story. The denial of the existence of what she calls 'pure'
autobiography moves her toward fiction, as the memories do not allow
simply to be told. She has to sort them out, choose which stories to
tell, so they will have a direction, a structure. This choosing and
sorting highlights the fact that Frame's narrative is a meticulously
constructed narrative.12
One of the themes that is prevalent throughout the autobiography is
Frame's preoccupation with words. She writes about how she was
fascinated with words from an early age, a fascination which
prefigures her dream of becoming a writer. She describes how excited
12 As W. S. Broughton also points out in his essay, '"With Myself as

Myself": A Reading of Janet Frame's Autobiography', in The Ring of Fire:
Essays on Janet Frame, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangeroo Press, 1992)
pp. 221-232, p. 225.
104 Borderlines
she became by certain words and how they served as a blueprint for a
story:
I was enthralled by their meaning and by the fact that all

three seemed to be part of the construction of every story -
everyone was deciding, having a destination, observing, in
order to decide and define the destination and know how to
deal with adventures along the way. (To the Is-Land, p. 44)
The way Frame's choice and treatment of childhood memories subtly

anticipates later events is one of the major characteristics of her
autobiography. It is not overly emphasised and the reader has no
warning of what is going to happen to her. It is only when rereading
the text that one sees the subtle, sometimes obscure, pointers, as in a
meticulously constructed novel. 'Everyone deciding' would, for a long
period in her life, mean someone else deciding for her what her
'destination' would be.
With this early feeling for plot, we see the plot of her own story, her
'adventures' and how she became a writer. We see a child obsessed
with words, stories and poetry she often misunderstands:
'I read a story, To the Is-Land, about some children going to

an Is-Land.'
'It's I-Land,' Myrtle corrected.
[. . .]
In the end, reluctantly, I had to accept the ruling, although
within myself I still thought of it as the Is-Land. (To the Is-
Land, p. 41)
On the surface Frame accepts her older sister's authority but in her
own mind 'island' remains an 'is-land', thereby stating her own
identity, and she emphasises the fact by using the title of this story as
a title for the autobiography's first volume. It is as if she has reclaimed
the right to use words in the way she wants, and no longer has to
accept outside intervention and authority. Hence, Frame reasserts her
private symbolism and myths, which others looked at as misreadings
and misunderstandings. The title of the first volume refers to her
fascination with words, but also denotes a journey from the 'was-land'
(the past) to the Is-land (the present), a journey to another place, 'third
place', 'a mirror city', which refers to her life as a writer but also to her
homeland, New Zealand. And by using 'is-land' in the title of her
autobiography, Frame reasserts her authority over words, and her
private understanding of them.
Frame constantly reiterates how we experience events through
words. There are forbidden words that dramatic events suddenly make
commonplace. She describes her reaction to her sister's early death
thus: 'This sudden intrusion of the word morgue into our lives, where
before it had been a forbidden word, with us now saying it openly,
made me feel grown-up, accomplished, and alone' (To the Is-Land, p.
107). Frame describes her sister's death in terms of the weight and
importance of new words; how that tragic event meant that words
were suddenly allowed which previously had been forbidden. Thus it
is the acceptance of the word 'morgue' into their lives which denotes
how her sister's death made her feel 'grown-up, accomplished, and
alone'. Frame captures in this one sentence all her ambivalent feelings
about her sister's death, as she both loved her and was frightened of
her behaviour.
Frame's longing for peace, for being a 'good girl', not to 'make
trouble', make her at times almost invisible in the narrative. We read
many stories about other members of her family; her brother's
epilepsy, her sister's dreams of fame and her sister's disobedience. It is
only when it comes to poetry that Janet as a character comes alive.
She often talks about her childhood wish to be special and her very
romantic notions of the life of a poet. Frame is certain she needs
imagination, something she does not believe she has, but 'imagination'
is after all only a word: 'My life had been for many years in the power
of words. It was driven now by a constant search and need for what
was, after all, 'only a word' - imagination' (To the Is-Land, p. 140).
Years later, after having spent time in a mental hospital, another
word enters her life, which is going to have dramatic effects on her
whole existence:
106 Borderlines
My visit to the Seacliff doctor at the Oamaru hospital

brought its own bewilderment, for the medical certificate
stated: Nature of Illness; Schizophrenia.
At home I announced, half with pride, half with fear, 'I've
got Shizzofreenier.'13
Frame finds this out after being in hospital and does not know what it
means. Her sense of fear and alienation is expressed poignantly in this
instant of mis-pronunciation. The diagnosis (perhaps a better word
would be 'the verdict' as it has all the power of a condemnation), she
finds out by accident, turns out to be only a word since in fact she
never was schizophrenic. Frame inscribes some words, for instance
'destination', 'adventure', 'morgue', 'imagination', 'schizophrenia' with
almost omnipotent power. They come to symbolise her inner life, her
dreams, and her aspirations. We see in this text also the darker side of
this fascination with words. Words do not only denote freedom and
expression but can also be used by others to define one, and this
labelling can relegate one to the third person. Thus language in this
text both frees and binds.
Frame talks throughout her autobiography about moving between
the first, second and third person, describing her student days, when
her timidity and lack of confidence left her by herself, thus:
- all of my family were part of the shared 'we' which I knew

to be lost. I tried to use 'we' when I talked of my life as a
student, but I knew it was futile, that I was describing what
'they', the students did, where they went, how they felt,
what they said, and in order to survive I had to conceal my
'I', what I really felt, thought, and dreamed about. I had
moved from the second person plural to a shadowy 'I',
almost a nothingness, like a no-woman's land. (An Angel at
My Table, p. 27)
Frame would inhabit this 'no-woman's land' for some time to come.
She is denied the possibility of a collective identity - a substitute
13 Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 72.

family - but she is still not an individual. Here 'I' denotes a ghostly
nothingness rather than a presence. Frame is fascinated with words,
she is defined and labelled and a prisoner of words, but words in the
end free her. Her treatment of these stories about words follow the
same pattern throughout the autobiography. The stories are not a free-
flow of fragmented thoughts, but describe a struggle to control words
and to control language. All these stories about fascination, labelling,
and freedom serve to highlight some aspects of her life and character:
the child who wanted to be a poet; the young woman who clung to
labels and words even though they were harmful, as long as they gave
her an identity; and the freedom the writer exercises by using words to
serve her own ends, her own poetic language. It is by becoming a
writer that the power shifts, from words that had power over her, to
her having power over words.
Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire is also, although with
different emphasis, very much concerned with language, as it recounts
Cardinal's slow recovery from mental illness through psychoanalysis.
Cardinal describes her mental health in terms of the relationship she
had with words and language. At the start of the book she has great
difficulty with words and then gradually she gains more control over
them instead of letting them control her. The structure of the book is
reminiscent of the English detective story. The book starts when
Cardinal's health is at its lowest point (the crime) when she goes to
see the doctor (the detective) for the first time. From then on she goes
backward in time to explain the reasons why she got to this point (the
motive) and forwards in time to explain how she was eventually cured
(the detection and solution). She, therefore, holds the reader in double
suspension; how did this happen? and how (as the reader knows she is
cured) will she be cured?
Cardinal's main worry at the start of Les Mots pour le dire is how
she is going to find the words to talk to the doctor: 'Prostre comme je
l'tais, recluse dans mon univers, comment trouver les mots qui
passeraient de moi lui?'14 It is vital to her to 'trouver les mots qui
14 Marie Cardinal, Les Mots pour le dire (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1975), p.
11. (Hereafter quoted in the text with Pat Goodheart's translation in
108 Borderlines
passeraient de moi lui'. Communication is of great importance; it is

almost a matter of life and death, as she has to find the words in order
to find a way out of her chaotic universe. The book starts in a
wordless muddle. Cardinal lives in a world where words have a life of
their own, they are dangerous and do not communicate or express
anything:
Pour moi, cette poque, un mot, isol de la masse des

autres mots se mettait exister, devenait une chose
importante, devenait peut-tre mme la chose la plus
importante, qui m'habitait, me torturait, ne me quittait plus,
reparaissait dans mes nuits et m'attendait mon reveil. (Les
Mots pour le dire, p. 16)15
This is an even starker example, compared to Frame, of the

destructive power of words. Cardinal works very hard to get away
from this over-emphasis on isolated words, words that in the end do
not make sense.
This tortuous relationship with words is gradually reversed in the
psychoanalysis:
'Parlez, dites tout ce qui vous passe par la tte, essayez de

ne pas faire de tri, de ne pas rflchir, essayez de ne pas
arranger vos phrases. Tout est important, chaque mot.'
C'tait le seul remde qu'il me donnait et je m'en gavais.
Peut-tre que c'tait a l'arme contre la chose: ce flot de
mots, ce maelstrm de mots, cette masse de mots, cet
ouragan de mots! Les mots charriaient la mfiance, la peur,
l'incomprhension, la rigueur, la volont, l'ordre, la loi, la
footnotes.) 'Prostrate as I was, withdrawn into my own universe, how to find

the words which would flow between us?' The Words to Say It: An
Autobiographical Novel, trans. Pat Goodheart (London: The Women's Press,
1993), p. 3.
15 'For me at that time, a word isolated from the mass of other words started
to live, becoming an important thing, becoming perhaps even the most
important thing, inhabiting me, torturing me, never leaving me, reappearing
in my dreams, waiting for me to wake up.' p. 8.
discipline et aussi la tendresse, la douceur, l'amour, la

chaleur, la libert. (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 82)16
Cardinal moves from being a prisoner of words to being able to use

them to her own ends. The hurricane of words that sweeps away
everything in its path is not reflected in the text we have before us.
Cardinal explains that psychoanalysis cannot be written down, it
would take thousands of pages, so the text before us is a structured,
formal account of the meaning this flow of words had for her.
But it was also a flow of words that made Cardinal ill in the first
place as she explains in her book Autrement dit (1977):
Dans mon enfance puis dans ma jeunesse j'ai reu un

maximum d'informations, de vocabulaire, toute la gamme
des signes qui servent aux femmes occidentales protges
se reconnatre, profiter du monde, se dbrouiller. Tout
a m'a rendue folle comme tu sais, je l'ai aval de travers.17
It is the power of words and how they shape our lives, our ideas about
gender, and our identity that Cardinal is interested in. If you swallow
it wrong you go mad. But perhaps the interesting question that comes
up here is how is it possible to get all this information and not go
mad? And sometimes Cardinal's madness is presented as the
inevitable lot of women.
16 '"Talk, say whatever comes into your head; try not to choose or reflect, or
in any way compose your sentences. Everything is important, every word." It
was the only remedy he gave me and I gorged myself on it. Perhaps it was
my weapon against the Thing: that flood of words, that maelstrom, that mass
of words, that hurricane! Words swept away distrust, fear, lack of
understanding, severity, will, order, law, discipline as well as tenderness,
sweetness, love, warmth and freedom.' p. 65.
17 Marie Cardinal, Autrement dit (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1977), p. 64. 'In
my childhood, then in my adolescence, I received a maximum of
information, words, the entire gamut of signs protected western women use
to recognize themselves, to get by with, to profit from the world. All that
caused me to go mad, as you know. I swallowed it wrong.' In Other Words,
trans. Amy Cooper (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 50.
110 Borderlines
Cardinal's relationship with words gradually changes throughout the

book. She learns to understand the importance of communication and
she learns to say words she could not say before. She accepts and
iterates words about bodily functions and her own body and therefore
accepts her own body: 'J'tais une dame rouge dans un chteau des
cartes. Suffisait de dire le mot 'merde', de penser sans honte et sans
dgot ce que ce mot contenait, pour que le chteau s'croule!' (Les
Mots pour le dire, p. 264).18 This is an intense relationship with words
that is slowly transformed into a more creative mode as she starts
writing. The text is a carefully structured account of the chaos that
was her life. Her handling of words is not like it was in the
psychoanalysis itself, but at one remove from the process of
psychoanalysis because now taken up into the process of writing.
3. The Discourse of Madness and Liberation
Frame's and Cardinal's descriptions of the mental illnesses they

suffered from seem to have one thing in common. The illness is
somehow 'unsayable'.19 Cardinal searches for the 'words to say it'
while Frame describes madness as isolation from the world because of
her inability to express herself. Neither of them finds in mental illness
any source of creativity. In her study of the metaphors and myths
18 'I was a red queen in a castle of cards. It was enough to say the word 'shit'
free of shame and disgust before what was contained in the word, for the
castle to fall down!' p. 243.
19 The relationship between madness, gender, and writing has preoccupied
feminist discourse as this passage by Shosana Felman illustrates: 'If, in our
culture, the woman is by definition associated with madness, her problem is
how to break out of this (cultural) imposition of madness without taking up
the critical and therapeutic positions of reason: how to avoid speaking both as
mad and as not mad. The challenge facing the woman today is nothing less
than to "re-invent" language, to re-learn how to speak: to speak not only
against, but outside of the specular phallogocentric structure, to establish a
discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of
masculine meaning.' 'Woman and Madness: The Critical Phallacy', Diacritics
(Winter 1975) 2-10 (pp. 9-10).
surrounding cancer and tuberculosis Susan Sontag claims: 'Any

disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be
felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.'20 This could also be
applied to mental illness (perhaps even more so), and the stigma
attached to it.
Mary Elene Wood points to the central problem that women who
have been declared insane face when writing about their experiences:
All of these writers were faced with the problem of how to

create self-narratives that would be read as legitimate, as
sane, when they themselves had been labelled insane [. . .]
Insanity was that which literary form was not, that which
acceptable literature contained or excluded. To make an
argument or to tell a story was to spin out a logic. How
could these women use these forms to tell their stories
without recreating the very categories of sane and insane
that had meant their own ostracism and incarceration and
that continued to rule the lives of women left behind in the
asylum?21
This is at the centre of both Frame's and Cardinal's works; the loss of
authority and legitimacy they experienced because of their mental
problems. And they attempt to regain authority and selfhood in
writing. What distinguishes them from the nineteenth-century
autobiographers Wood writes about is that Frame and Cardinal are
both experienced and established writers when they write their
autobiographies. Frame wrote her first novel, Owls do Cry (1961) -
which many readers thought was autobiographical - on a woman who
was 'left behind in the asylum'. Distinguishing herself from the
woman who did not get out, Frame gained control over her own life,
her own story.22
20 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1978), p. 6.
21 Mary Elene Wood, The Writing on the Wall: Women's Autobiography
and the Asylum (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 11.
22 Wood mentions this as well: 'The control over her life lost in the asylum
is regained in the telling of the narrative.' Ibid., p. 10.
112 Borderlines
Mental illness carries a stigma that no other illness has. Frame

explains how the mentally ill were viewed in her community:
The train drew into the station. Yes, the loonies were there;
everyone look out at the loonies, known in Oamaru as those
who were sent 'down the line', and in Dunedin, 'up the line'.
Often it was hard to tell who were the loonies. A few
people left the train here - they'd be relations, visiting. We
had no loonies in our family, although we knew of people
who had been sent 'down the line', but we did not know
what they looked like, only that there was a funny look in
their eye and they'd attack you with a bread knife or an axe.
(An Angel at My Table, p. 13)
If madness is not represented here as 'morally, if not literally

contagious', it is nevertheless dangerous to come into contact with the
insane as they will attack you. You were 'sent' there, and were
distinguished by a menacing gaze. Many years later Frame becomes
one of the 'loonies', and one of 'them'.
After a time in her 'no-woman's land' Frame is almost relieved to
have a label: schizophrenia. She does not recognise any of the
symptoms but after having been intensely lonely she is suddenly
noticed, and she has a word that explains away all her troubles: 'My
consolation was my 'talks' with John Forrest as he was my link with
the world I had known, and because I wanted these 'talks' to continue,
I built up a formidable schizophrenic repertoire' (An Angel at My
Table, p. 78). What Frame describes here is a 'fake' psychoanalysis:
the words do not free her as they do Cardinal; Frame makes them up
to keep John Forrest interested, to get the attention she so badly
craves. Forrest tells her of artists who suffered from mental illnesses
and Frame believes that finally she has what it takes to become a
writer (even without 'imagination'). Frame tells a story of her
childhood that prefigures how she clings to her 'schizophrenia' later.
She listens to performances from 'crippled' children on the radio: 'I
came to link the two. I perceived that in a world where it was
admirable to be brave and noble, it was more brave and noble to be
writing poems if you were crippled or blind than if you had no

disability' (To the Is-Land, p. 98).
The need to be special, the dreams of some recognition, only gain
their terrifying significance half-way through the book when we learn
of her stays in mental hospitals. Disability is noble, makes one a better
artist, gives one access to the world of the mind, just as 'imagination'
was her ticket to that world. Frame constantly expresses ambivalent
feelings toward her predicament. On the one hand she likes the
attention and being able to get rid of all external pressures and
responsibility by going into hospital, but on the other hand the
hospitals are dreadful places where she almost comes to spend the rest
of her life, and where she is relegated to the third person:
My previous community had been my family. In To the Is-

Land I constantly use the first person plural - we, not I. My
time as a student was an I-time. Now, as a Seacliff patient, I
was again part of a group, yet more deeply alone, not even
a creviced 'I'. I became 'she', one of 'them'. (An Angel at My
Table, p. 70)
Frame becomes one of them, the people on the outside, who are not
viewed as individuals, but as a collective group of others. It is
impossible to assert any individuality and thereby any authority over
one's experience.
It is only when we re-read the autobiography that we realise how
carefully structured it is both in terms of its form and content. The
stories from Frame's childhood have a subtle connection to the main
theme of the second volume: writing and madness. When she
describes a piano lesson where her teacher tells her mother, 'Jean's
brilliant'23, she describes her ambivalent reaction:
This judgement pleased, confused, and frightened me with

an intrusion of opinion and expectation that would now
deny me the world of making music as a place of private
escape [. . .] Therefore, although I was proud of being
thought 'brilliant', I wanted to hide, and, noting this, Jessie
23 Janet Frame was called 'Jean' as a child.

114 Borderlines
said to Mum, using that identity-destroying third person,

'She's shy'. (To the Is-Land, p. 134)
Her use of the phrase 'identity-destroying third person' only becomes

significant in the second volume where the 'praising, blaming scrutiny
of others' eventually lands her in hospital. In the first chapters of An
Angel at My Table it is stated repeatedly how scared she is of other
people, of other groups to which she does not belong, of the opinions
of others. She longs for a 'private escape' but she also dreams of
becoming a published writer: '[I] dreamed of seeing my poems
printed, myself speaking out boldly, brilliantly, in denial of my
timidity, isolation and fear of The World' (An Angel at My Table, p.
29). The story of the piano lesson follows the same structure; the
confusion when someone praises her, followed by longing for a place
of private escape, which is what she eventually finds in writing. So the
cyclical structure of the trilogy is repeated in other stories within the
trilogy. The theme of being denied her 'own' self, of being silenced
and then finally speaking out is repeated again and again.
Most of her life, until she is sent to the mental hospital, has been
spent 'being a good girl', being 'no trouble at all', a part of family or
school. But like most of her masks, her ways of coping with the world
do not work in the end. There are always the oppositional drives
between the desire to 'be no trouble at all' and the fear of denying her
own self:
What, in all the world, could I do to earn my living and still

live as myself, as I knew myself to be. Temporary masks, I
knew, had their place; everyone was wearing them, they
were the human rage; but not masks cemented in place
until the wearer could not breathe and was eventually
suffocated. (An Angel at My Table, pp. 62-63)
This is how she explains her great need for self-expression and her
only way of self-expression is writing. It is a tortuous route for her on
her way to 'live as herself, as she knew herself to be'. It is a fight that
takes many years, most of them spent in mental homes. She does not
describe her stays in them in any detail and it is not until years later in
London that doctors finally try to find out the nature of her problems.
That process is no less traumatic:
The loss was great. At first, the truth seemed to be more

terrifying than the lie. Schizophrenia, as a psychosis, had
been an accomplishment, removing ordinary responsibility
from the suffered. I was bereaved. I was ashamed. How
could I ask for help directly when there was 'nothing wrong
with me'? How could I explain myself when I could no
longer move cunningly but necessarily from the status of a
writer to one of having schizophrenia, back and forth when
the occasion suited?24
Her whole world and identity is shattered once more. Frame has to
rebuild her life, knowing that she has lost ten years needlessly. The
restraints of the verdict of having schizophrenia were great but it also
offered freedom from ordinary responsibilities. As 'imagination' was
once taken from her so is 'schizophrenia'. Frame's central problem is
that others were allowed to define her and her life. That is, of course,
one of the ways in which minorities are kept marginalised. The same
power structure is at work, the same binarism: healthy versus ill,
especially in the cases of mental illness, real or otherwise. That is also
Cardinal's problem; it was not until somebody came along who
allowed her to define herself that cure was possible.
Masks, lies and problems with identity are also themes in Cardinal's
Les Mots pour le dire. Cardinal describes how she 'hid' behind a
physical problem so as to mask the mental problems:
Tout cela justifiait - me semblait-il - mon drangement, le

rendait acceptable, moins douteux. On ne mettait pas en
asile une femme parce qu'elle saignait et que cela la
terrifiait. Tant que je ne parlerais que du sang on ne verrait
que lui, on ne verrait pas ce qu'il masquait. (Les Mots pour
le dire, p. 14)25
24 Janet Frame, The Envoy from Mirror City (London: Flamingo, 1993), pp.
115-116. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
25 'All that - it seemed to me - vindicated my troubled mind, made it
acceptable, less suspect. They wouldn't put a woman in an asylum just
116 Borderlines
This relationship between body and language has been very much
central to theories on criture feminine, both for Luce Irigaray and
Cixous. As Irigaray points out: 'Women do not manage to articulate
their madness: they suffer it directly in their body.'26 This is at the
heart of Cardinal's problem. There is one clear distinction to be made
here between the two texts. Cardinal's mental problems were of a
much more serious nature than Frame's problems which were mostly
caused by long stays in mental hospitals. Cardinal's work is about how
psychoanalysis cured her of her very real and frightening problems.
The scenes Cardinal remembers are transformed in psychoanalysis
and then again in writing.
The relationship between madness and writing in both texts is that
one negates the other in the sense that writing is a cure, and madness
is not a point of creation. Writing is not possible in the isolated world
of mental illness, neither is describing that illness possible in writing.
It is only after Frame and Cardinal overcome their troubles that it is
possible for them to speak out, to communicate with others. Mental
illness for them is a denial of self-representation, it is a denial of the
contradictions in their lives, the self-contradiction Barbara Johnson
believes to be 'vigorously repressed in women'.27 It is these
contradictions in their lives, in their feelings toward others, that they
are finally able to express without fear of 'the world' in Frame's case,
fear of the 'thing' (which is how she describes her illness) in Cardinal's
case.
It is also at times the case that these stories of mental illness are
parallel to the role gender plays in their lives. Wood says about her
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors:
because she was bleeding and it terrified her. As long as I would only speak
about the blood, only the blood would be seen, not what it masked.' p. 6.
26 Luce Irigaray in an interview with Diana Adlam and Couze Venn in
'Women's Exile: Interview with Luce Irigaray', Ideology and Consciousness
(Summer 1978), quoted in Mary Jacobus, 'The Question of Language: Men
of Maxims and The Mill on the Floss', in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed.
Elizabeth Abel (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 37-52, p. 52.
27 Johnson, op. cit., p. 153.
As each writer tells a story of diagnosis, incarceration, and

transformation, she discovers and engages the ways that
definitions of 'woman' and the 'feminine' intersect with
notions of madness. She comes to question the boundary
she was taught to see between normality and abnormality,
legitimate religious belief and mental disease, lay
experience and expert knowledge, the inside of the asylum
and the outside.28
Frame's and Cardinal's texts echo this description. Frame in her

attempts to avoid traditional female roles - becoming a teacher or
having a family - and this struggle against expectations, and in some
sense her own feelings, is what drives her into the mental homes.
Cardinal refuses throughout her work to use the jargon of
psychoanalysis. She emphasises the 'lay experience', and gives it
authority and at the same time emphasises the uniqueness of each
individual's experience of psychoanalysis.29 Madness and the
feminine have been equated in the past, for example in the form of the
strong link between women and hysteria.30 Breaking away from
madness can signify a breaking away from any relegation, such as
doing what is expected of you as a woman: being a good girl and
taking on the role (the mask) that you are expected to. Self-
contradiction is also a large factor in the representation of mother-
daughter relationships. The autobiographies we are concerned with are
about the reclaiming of lives, through stories, and in the next section I
28 Wood, op. cit., p. 21.

29 As Lucille Cairns explains: 'Cardinal's style is often highly poetic, but it
never mystifies, making instead a virtue of limpid clarity. Like Annie Ernaux
or Danile Sallenave, she shuns the obfuscation risked by the densely poetic
style characteristic of criture fminine, instead prioritising communication
over the attractions of esotericity.' Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and
Creativity (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German
Publications, 1992), p. 6.
30 See for instance Elaine Showalter's discussion in Hystories: Hysterical
Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), especially pp. 49-62.
118 Borderlines
will look at how this manifests itself in the descriptions of the crucial
mother-daughter relationship.
4. The Mother and Sexuality
The relationship with the mother is a theme handled in many

autobiographies by women.31 It is a crucial element in Cardinal's
work, but not as prominent in Frame's autobiography. The mother-
daughter relationship has also been analysed by many feminist
theorists and is clearly an area of great importance in any discussion
of gender and autobiography. I examine the pattern these narratives
follow, look at similarities and differences and see what it tells us
about fiction and autobiography. Marie Cardinal's autobiography
describes a complex and disastrous mother-daughter relationship.
Cardinal describes how after a mental illness she went through
psychoanalysis and was slowly liberated from her illness (and her
mother) through talking and writing. Cardinal's tale is one of rebirth as
if she was never 'completely' born because of what her mother did to
her.
The representation of the mother as a force of repression of sexuality
and desire is common in women's writing. The main obstacle on the
road to the freedom the woman desires is her mother, and her feelings
toward her mother. The central problem in mother-daughter
relationships, according to some theorists, is the mother's denial of her
sexual being that causes the daughter's repression of sexuality and
desire. Nancy Friday claims:
Saying one thing about sex and motherhood, feeling

contrary emotions about both at the same time, mother
presents an enigmatic picture to her daughter. The first lie -
the denial that a woman's sexuality may be in conflict with
31 For instance in Marguerite Duras, L'Amant (1984), Annie Ernaux, Une

Femme (1987), Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance (1983), Maxine Hong Kingston,
The Woman Warrior (1975), and many others.
her role as a mother - is so upsetting to traditional ideas

of femininity that it cannot be talked about.32
One can find instances of this in quite a few women's autobiographies.

Marguerite Duras says in L'Amant: 'La mre n'a pas connu la
jouissance'.33 And Cardinal describes an instance of seeing her mother
enjoy pleasure:
J'piais ma mre. Elle tait seule et elle arpentait la longue

pice. Si bien qu' chacun de ses passages je pouvais voir
nettement l'expression de son visage et cela me flanquait un
coup au cur. Ses traits taient libres. Ses yeux presque
ferms, sa bouche entrouverte, laissant filtrer un plaisir, une
satisfaction, intenses. Je la trouvais indcente. (Les Mots
pour le dire, p. 276)34
32 Nancy Friday, My Mother/My Self: A Daughter's Search for Identity

(London: Sheldon Press, 1979), p. 7. Julia Kristeva explains the same
problem in Des Chinoises: 'Between this historical constraint and the myth of
the Virgin impregnated by the Word there is still a certain distance, which
will be bridged by two psychoanalytical processes, one relating to the role of
the mother, the other to the workings of language. The first consists in
ceasing to repress the fact that the mother is other, has no penis, but
experiences jouissance and bears children. But this acknowledged only at the
pre-conscious level: just enough to imagine that she bears children, while
censuring the fact that she has experienced jouissance in an act of coitus, that
there was a 'primal scene'. Once more, the vagina and the jouissance of the
mother are disregarded and immediately replaced by that which puts the
mother on the side of the socio-symbolic community: childbearing and
procreation in the name of the father.' 'On Chinese Women', trans. Sen Hand
in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp.
139-159, p. 146.
33 Marguerite Duras, L'Amant (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1984), p. 50.
'Their mother never knew pleasure.' The Lover, trans. Barbara Bray (London:
Collins, 1985), p. 43.
34 'I was spying on my mother. She was alone, pacing the long room. So that
each time she went by I could see clearly the expression on her face and it
dealt me a blow to the heart. Her features were relaxed. Her eyes, almost
closed, her mouth partly open, let out intense pleasure and satisfaction. I
found her indecent.' p. 256.
120 Borderlines
Cardinal spies on her mother, sees her in a state of pleasure and finds
her indecent. It is evident from many of these texts that the daughter
finds it difficult to imagine that the mother is a sexual being with her
own desires. When they are glimpsed in a fleeting moment of
pleasure, it offends and disturbs the image of the mother's body. But it
is precisely this denial of sexual desire that inhibits the daughter's
pleasure as well.
Annie Ernaux has written on her mother in Une Femme. She
attempts there to look objectively at her mother by looking at her
status in society. She describes the difficulty this poses:
En crivant, je vois tantt la 'bonne' mre, tantt la

'mauvaise'. Pour chapper ce balancement venu du plus
loin de l'enfance, j'essaie de dcrire et d'expliquer comme
s'il s'agissait d'une autre mre et d'une fille qui ne serait pas
moi. Ainsi, j'cris de la manire la plus neutre possible,
mais certaines expressions ('s'il t'arrive un malheur!') ne
parviennent pas l'tre pour moi, comme le seraient
d'autres, abstraites ('refus du corps et de la sexualit' par
exemple). Au moment o je me les rappelle, j'ai la mme
sensation de dcouragement qu' seize ans, et,
fugitivement, je confonds la femme qui a le plus marqu
ma vie avec ces mres africaines serrant les bras de leur
petite fille derrire son dos, pendant que la matrone
exciseuse coupe le clitoris.35
35 Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1987), p. 62. 'As I
write, I see her sometimes as a 'good', sometimes as a 'bad' mother. To get
away from these contrasting views, which come from my earliest childhood,
I try to describe and explain her life as if I were writing about someone else's
mother and a daughter who wasn't me. Although I try to be as objective as
possible, certain expressions, such as 'If you ever have an accident. . .' will
always strike a sensitive chord in me, while others remain totally abstract, for
instance, 'the denial of one's own body and sexuality'. When I remember
these expressions, I experience the same feeling of dillusion I had when I was
sixteen. Fleetingly, I confuse the woman who influenced me most with an
African mother pinning her daughter's arms behind her back while the village
midwife slices off the girl's clitoris.' A Woman's Story, trans. Tanya Leslie
(London, New York: Quartet Books, 1990), pp. 50-51.
This violent image of the mother, which objectivity and sociology

cannot free her from, is very different from ideas some feminist
theorists have about the mother as a benevolent source of creativity.
Toril Moi explains Hlne Cixous's ideas thus:
What [Cixous] describes as some tentative comments turn

out to be no less than a lyrical, euphoric evocation of the
essential bond between feminine writing and the mother as
source and origin of the voice to be heard in all female
texts.36
And later on Moi explains: 'Cixous's mother-figure is clearly what

Melanie Klein would call the Good Mother: the omnipotent and
generous dispenser of love, nourishment and plenitude.'37 There is a
conflict between descriptions of mother-daughter relationships in
many of the texts and some feminists' ideas about the 'good mother'.38
Not that the autobiographers never describe the mother as generous
and loving, but they all describe the conflicts inherent to the
relationship. Barbara Johnson asks: 'Is autobiography somehow
always in the process of symbolically killing the mother off by telling
her the lie that we have given birth to ourselves?'39 It seems that one
36 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London:

Methuen, 1985), p. 114.
37 Ibid., p. 115.
38 It is interesting to note that this conflict between the positive aspects of
the 'feminine' described by theorists and the violence in the texts can also be
seen elsewhere. Leah D. Hewitt points out in her discussion of Sarraute: 'And
yet, despite these resemblances, there remains one crucial aspect of the
tropism that sets it apart from Irigaray's fluids, Kristeva's semiotic, and
Chodorow's concept of female identity. Whereas the latter are positive forces
advocated by the authors, the tropism appears openly confrontational in
nature. Sarraute's readers rarely fail to recognize the negativity of the
tropism: it involves them most often in the pain and anguish of missed
contacts, of failed attempts at communication, or of violent forms of
interaction. In Sarraute's world, the possible fusion between people is always
threatened.' Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1990), p. 69.
39 Johnson, op. cit., p. 147.
122 Borderlines
could look at that as part of the function of autobiography. Writing an

autobiography is in one sense to give birth to yourself, your story. It
renders the mother's role obsolete and therefore symbolically kills her
off. Most of the writers discussed here talk about the mother in terms
of denial of desire and as an obstacle on their way to become writers.
It is not because of her they are what they are, but despite her.
Admitting to the violence of this strong relationship, often depicted in
bodily images and metaphors, usually leads to an attempt at getting
rid of the mother.
The most violent moment in Cardinal's work is when her mother
tells her, as a part of her warning speech about what happens when
girls become women, that she tried to abort her:
L, dans la rue, en quelques phrases, elle a crev mes yeux,

elle a perce mes tympans, elle a arrach mon scalp, elle a
coup mes mains, elle a cass mes genoux, elle a tortur
mon ventre, elle a mutil mon sexe.
Je sais aujourd'hui qu'elle tait inconsciente du mal qu'elle
me faisait et je ne la hais plus. Elle chassait sa folie sur moi,
je lui servais d'holocauste. (Les Mots pour le dire, pp. 153-
4)40
Again Cardinal uses a bodily metaphor to describe a psychological

state as in the blood episode; her body is literally torn apart. As her
mother tells her how she tried to get rid of her, Cardinal pays her back
in kind by writing the autobiography. In her case she exists literally
despite her mother. She has long since given birth to herself. And
when she realises how she was the sacrifice of her mother's madness,
she is slowly cured of her own madness.
This struggle between mother and daughter is a dangerous power
conflict, and is reminiscent of the danger Cixous sees as inherent in
40 'There on the street, in a few sentences, she put out my eyes, pierced my
eardrums, scalped me, cut off my hands, shattered my kneecaps, tortured my
stomach, and mutilated my genitals. Today, I know she was unaware of the
harm she did me and I no longer hate her. She was discharging her madness
onto me; I was the sacrifice.' p. 135.
any binary categories, such as culture/nature, as they are dependent

upon power and exclusion. Shiach explains:
Each couple is based on the repression of one of its terms,

yet both terms are locked together in violent conflict.
Without 'nature', 'culture' is meaningless, yet culture must
continually struggle to negate nature, to dominate and
control it, with obvious deadly results.41
If we substituted 'mother' and 'daughter' for 'nature' and 'culture', we

can see how dangerous this relationship can be. But this struggle is
usually not maintained throughout; it is only one phase in this often
most important of relationships. The mother-daughter relationship
also provides a different structure that I look at in the next part.
4.1. A Presence, a Monster, an Absence: Writing on the

Mother
The pattern the narrative of the mother-daughter relationship often

follows can be summarised thus: a constant presence, the mother's
nurturing side; feelings of hatred, repulsion, guilt, described as
monstrous; and finally an absence, echoing Nancy Chodorow's ideas
on feminine identity.42 In the first volume of her autobiography Frame
describes her mother as a constant, loving presence. She describes
other mothers as 'thin mothers with no lap and no titties; all the other
mothers except our own who was soft and went on about nature and
God but who would never be cruel to anything or anyone' (To the Is-
Land, p. 73). Again the mother is described in terms of her body. The
41 Shiach, op. cit., p. 7.

42 'Because mothers are the primary love object and object of identification
for children of both genders, and because fathers come into the relational
picture later and differently, the oedipus complex in girls is characterized by
the continuation of preoedipal attachments and preoccupations.' The
Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 133.
124 Borderlines
mother seldom becomes a character in her own right in these

autobiographies. It is the relationship between mother and daughter,
and how the daughter perceives her mother that is all important.
Virginia Woolf's mother died when Woolf was very young. She
explains how that makes it difficult to see her as a person in her own
right: 'And of course she was central, I suspect the word 'central' gets
closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in her
atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as
a person.'43 The mother is a body, a presence that is always there.
If there is one word that sums up the general state of the mother-
daughter relationship it is contradiction. It is the mixed feelings of
love and hatred, violence and comfort that mark these narratives.
Duras writes in L'Amant :
Dans les histoires de mes livres qui se rapportent mon

enfance, je ne sais plus tout coup ce que j'ai vit de dire,
ce que j'ai dit, je crois avoir dit l'amour que l'on portait
notre mre mais je ne sais pas si j'ai dit la haine qu'on lui
portait aussi et l'amour qu'on se portait les uns les autres, et
la haine aussi, terrible, dans cette histoire commune de
ruine et de mort qui tait celle de cette famille dans tous les
cas, dans celui de l'amour comme dans celui de la haine et
qui chappe encore tout mon entendement, qui m'est
encore inaccessible, cache au plus profond de ma chair,
aveugle comme un nouveau-n du premier jour.44
43 Virginia Woolf, 'A Sketch of the Past', in Moments of Being: Unpublished

Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1976), p. 92.
44 Duras, op. cit., p. 34. 'In the books I've written about my childhood I can't
remember, suddently, what I left out, what I said. I think I wrote about out
love for our mother, but I don't know if I wrote about how we hated her too,
or about our love for one another, and our terrible hatred too, in that common
family history of ruin and death which was ours whatever happened, in love
or in hate, and which I still can't understand however hard I try, which is still
beyond my reach, hidden in the very depths of my flesh, blind as a new-born
child.' p. 29.
There is no simple resolution to these strong feelings; being objective

does not lessen them, and distance and time seem to do little, they still
have a remarkably strong hold on the autobiographer. Duras says of
her mother: 'elle est enfermer, battre, tuer', and calls her 'la salet,
ma mre, mon amour'.45 The emotions of love and hate are
characterised by need and repulsion, moving constantly between
identification and alienation.
Cardinal talks about the structure of her relationship with her mother
as she explored it in psychoanalysis:
Je me suis mise parler de ma mre et cela ne s'est pas

arrt jusqu' la fin de l'analyse. Au cours des annes je me
suis enfonce en elle comme dans un gouffre noir. Ainsi ai-
je fait la connaissance de la femme qu'elle voulait que je
sois [. . .] De ma mre, maintenant, j'ai le souvenir de
l'avoir aime la folie au cours de mon enfance et de mon
adolescence, puis de l'avoir hae et enfin de l'avoir
volontairement abandonne trs peu de temps avant sa mort
qui a d'ailleurs mis un point final mon analyse. (Les Mots
pour le dire, pp. 83-84)46
This is exactly what happens in many of the autobiographies: first

love and then hate and finally an absence of feelings or in some cases
pity. On their way to becoming their own persons the authors'
relationship with the mother follows the same pattern. When they
refuse to play the 'good little girl' the conflict starts, and when the
conflict cannot be sustained it ends either in distancing or acceptance.
There is a fear shared by Cardinal, Frame, and Duras of becoming
like their mothers. This is portrayed as the very worst thing that could
45 Ibid., pp. 31-32. 'she ought to be locked up, beaten, killed'. 'The beast, my
mother, my love.' pp. 26-27.
46 'I began to speak of my mother, never stopping until the end of the
analysis. Over the years I explored the very depths of her being, as though
she were a dark cavern. Thus did i make the acquaintance of the woman she
wanted me to be [. . .] What I now remember of my mother is having loved
her to distraction in childhood and adolescence, then having hated her, and
finally, having abandoned her just before her death, which moreover, put a
stop to my analysis.' pp. 66-67.
126 Borderlines
happen. Frame's mother wrote poetry but Frame does not want to
identify with that at all, she resents her even more because of it:
Aware now that Mother had turned increasingly to poetry

for shelter, as I was doing, I, with an unfeelingness based
on misery of feeling, challenged the worth of some of her
beloved poets, aware that my criticism left her flushed and
unhappy while I felt a save joy at her distress. I had begun
to hate her habit of waiting hand and foot, martyrlike upon
her family. When I was eager to do things for myself,
Mother was always there, anxious to serve. (An Angel at
My Table, p. 159)
The presence that was once comforting has now become cloying and
repressing. There is a 'save joy' in seeing her suffer. Any thought that
the mother is a person with needs and desires is repressed. The
uncontrollable rage toward the mother - because she is what they think
they will become, or because they know they cannot ever break away
from her, that she will always be there in one way or another - is
constantly reiterated. This rage also stems from a fear of losing
themselves, of never being able to say 'I', to be independent from her
all-encompassing embrace, that can suffocate as much as comfort.
There is a constant fear of the moment of identification as this
quotation from Frame illustrates:
I enjoyed waiting on people, attending to their comfort,

doing as they asked, bringing the food they ordered. I had
no impatience, irritation, anger, to subdue: I seemed to be a
'born' servant. The knowledge frightened me: I was
behaving as my mother had done all the years I had known
her, and I was enjoying my new role: I could erase myself
completely and live only through the feeling of others. (An
Angel at My Table, pp. 77-8)
In this complete erasure of 'herself', she sees her mother and that
moment of identification frightens her. It is not that her mother was
without character, what Frame realises is that the family has robbed
the mother of her personality; that being a mother killed her as an
individual. Frame asks: 'What had we done to her, each of us, day
after day, year after year, that we had washed away her evidence of
self?' (An Angel at My Table, p. 105). But it is too late as Frame
knows that her path leads her away from her mother: 'I knew, also,
that I would never be close to her, for my past and my future life were
barriers against the intimacy that grows between mother and daughter'
(An Angel at My Table, p. 112). Frame's denial of her mother's role, of
what her mother had hoped she would be, distances her from her
mother's dreams and expectations, and thereby denies the mother a
role in her life.
At the end of Les Mots pour le dire Cardinal visits her mother's
grave: 'Je vous aime. Oui, c'est a, je vous aime. Je suis venue ici pour
vous dclarer a une fois pour toutes. Je n'ai pas honte de vous parler.
a me fait du bien de vous le dire et de vous le rpter: je vous aime,
je vous aime' (Les Mots pour le dire, p. 312).47 When Cardinal's
mental health improves she frees herself from the strong feelings she
had towards her mother. At the end of her mother's life she pitied her
and, when she has been dead and buried for a while she finally
expresses her love for her.48 She is in some ways even grateful to her
mother, for giving her the chance of giving birth to herself: 'Si je
n'tais pas devenue folle je n'en serais jamais sortie' (Les Mots pour le
dire, p. 313).49
Frame, Cardinal and Duras all describe similar mother-daughter
relationships. They are characterised by comfort, struggle, violent
feelings, contradictions in the constant oscillation between
identification and alienation. The mother is her body, but without
desire or pleasure, relegated to the third person in the daughter's
autobiography. The descriptions are coloured by feelings of guilt,
hence the declarations of love and pity. The authors have fought their
battle and in some sense they have told themselves that they have
47 'I love you. Yes, that's right, I love you. I came here to declare it to you,
once and for all. I am not ashamed to speak of it. It does me good to say it to
you and repeat it! I love you. I love you.' p. 292.
48 See for instance Cairns, op. cit., p. 94. Hall also mentions that Cardinal
texts 'represent a search for one's voice and a breaking away from an
oppressive system of values which her mother embodies.' op. cit., p. 234.
49 'If I had not become insane, I would never have emerged.' p. 293.
128 Borderlines
given birth to themselves. One could say that that is one of the myths,
or fictions, of autobiography. What it means to be writing on their
mother, is not only claiming to have given birth to themselves, it is an
attempt to give birth to her, to be finally in control of that relationship,
not be the 'good girl' and behave, but make them behave. Ernaux
claims: 'Il me semble maintenant que j'cris sur ma mre pour, mon
tour, la mettre au monde.'50
5. Becoming a Writer
The direction of Frame's narrative is always toward her ultimate

goal, which is to become a writer. Her interest and fascination with
words, her fight against isolation and mental institutions, her
travelling after she finally gets out of the asylum, are all steps on her
way to become a writer. There are not many people who know from
an early age what they want to become and then follow that path
ceaselessly. This is the theme that gives an extra dimension to Frame's
tale of going into and getting out of mental homes, and lends an added
layer to the text.
Autobiography is, of course, a good standpoint for discussing self-
representation and that is what Frame, Cardinal and Duras all do. By
emphasising the importance of self-representation and writing they
add an extra dimension to the autobiographical project. For if writing
and being able to express yourself freely and independently can
change your life, autobiography must offer that kind of liberation as
well, since it is the ultimate tool for self-representation: telling your
own story, giving birth to yourself, and thereby claiming agency and
uniqueness.
As I discussed above, the mother is seen by these autobiographers as
an obstacle on the path to becoming a writer. Duras describes it thus:
50 Ernaux, op. cit., p. 43. 'I believe I am writing about my mother because it
is my turn to bring her into the world.' p. 27.
Je lui ai rpondu que ce que je voulais avant toute autre

chose c'tait crire, rien d'autre que a, rien. Jalouse elle est.
Pas de rponse, un regard bref aussitt dtourn, le petit
haussement d'paules, inoubliable. Je serai la premire
partir. Il faudra attendre encore quelques annes pour
qu'elle me perde, pour qu'elle perde celle-ci, cette enfant-ci.
Pour les fils il n'y avait pas de crainte avoir. Mais celle-ci,
un jour, elle le savait, elle partirait, elle arriverait sortir.51
There is a belief here that if one becomes a writer, one escapes from
the family, and from traditional female roles. Writing constitutes an
escape from the reality of women. It is to retreat from the world only
to speak to the world.
The emphasis in Frame's and Cardinal's texts is on how writing
constituted a liberation from a life they did not want, a liberation from
'madness'. Public recognition is of importance for both of them, but
even more so writing is seen as an opportunity to have a private space,
echoing earlier instances of this as in Virginia Woolf's A Room of
One's Own (1929) and Simone de Beauvoir's emphasis in her
autobiographical writings on her route to become a writer and
intellectual. Domna C. Stanton points to the importance of gender to
the act of writing:
Beyond professional aspirations there was, I believed, a

fundamental deviance that pervaded autogynographies and
produced conflicts in the divided self: the act of writing
itself. For a symbolic order that equates the idea(l) of the
author with a phallic pen transmitted from father to son
places the female writer in contradiction to the dominant
51 Duras, op. cit., p. 31. 'I answered that what I wanted more than anything
else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She's
jelous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug,
unforgettable. I'll be the first to leave. There are still a few years to wait
before she loses me, loses this one of her children. For the sons there's
nothing to fear. But this one, she knows, one day she'll go, she'll manage to
escape.' p. 26.
130 Borderlines
definition of woman and casts her as the usurper of male

prerogatives.52
One can link this idea that, by writing, women somehow become
'usurpers of male prerogatives' to how it often means freedom from
domesticity and allows women self-expression, space, and public
recognition. Ideas about criture feminine presume that women
always have to battle with a male-dominated discourse. But Toril Moi
criticises Cixous's theory: 'It is just this absence of any specific
analysis of the material factors preventing women from writing that
constitutes a major weakness in Cixous's utopia.'53 Frame and
Cardinal certainly voice a need of liberation through writing. It
constitutes a step away from the mother and the mother's role. But it is
seen as an area of freedom where they are no longer labelled or
relegated to the third person. The writing process itself is not seen as
in any way problematic.
For Frame finding her own world in her writing comes early. This is
where she claims her authority, where she expresses herself. She
describes being criticised by her sister for a word she uses in a poem:
I disagreed with Myrtle, who then insisted that there were

words and phrases you had to use, and when you were
writing about evening shadows, you always said 'tint', just
as you said that stars 'shone' or 'twinkled' and waves
'lapped' and the wind 'roared'. In spite of Myrtle's
insistence, I preferred 'touch' to 'tint' but in deference to her
obvious wisdom and wider knowledge I changed the word
to 'tint' when I took my poem to school. But later, when I
wrote it in my notebook, I reverted to 'touch the sky',
having my own way. (To the Is-Land, p. 83)
52 Domna C. Stanton, 'Autogynography - Is the Subject Different?', in The

Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to
the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3-20, p. 13.
53 Moi, op. cit., p. 123.
Frame builds up her private vision, despite opposition, despite

tradition and expectations. The sister claims authority Frame accepts
on the surface but then she goes her own way. 'Accepted' poetic
discourse is therefore represented as authoritarian, the emphasis is on
the importance of the private vision.
Frame wants to be thought of as a poet from an early age. She
believes that she needs something extra to do it, a disability, losing a
parent, imagination, and the 'right' words. For most of her formative
years she sees herself as always lacking, never having what it takes,
despite continually writing poems, winning poetry competitions and
getting published in magazines. Writing poetry is linked in Frame's
account to being accepted by others and therefore she sees it as
essential to use words that are accepted as 'poetic'. This is an
ambivalent ambition; a true longing for poetry is mixed with her lack
of confidence and longing for public acceptance. A feeling that also
permeates this autobiography is how alert she is to 'adventures', or the
epic possibilities of a life, as she explains:
When we as children experimented with our identity and

place by moving ourselves to encircle the planets, in our
repeated inscriptions - name, street, town - Oamaru, North
Otago, Otago, South Island, New Zealand, the Southern
Hemisphere, the World, the Universe, the Planets and Stars,
we were making a simple journey in words and, perhaps, a
prophecy of being; we were lyric poets forced to realize the
possibility of epics, and in a matter-of-fact way we included
these epic possibilities in our ordinary thinking. I mention
this because 1945, a year that began for me as a personal
lyric, ended through accident of circumstance, of national
and world events, as an epic embracing the universe, the
planets and the stars, this time expressed in deeds, not in
words. (An Angel at My Table, p. 54)
The dramatic events of 1945 both in Frame's personal life and in the
wider world serve as the focal point of her autobiography. She uses
them as the core around which she spins her tale. She does not discuss
at any length the world events, it is enough that the reader has them in
the back of his or her mind to be alert to the epic possibilities of a life.
132 Borderlines
These possibilities are also kept open throughout the autobiography as

she reminds us of what could have happened, what might have been,
had she not become a writer. It is as if there are two alternatives, the
'first place': darkness/leucotomy, and the 'third place': myth/the mirror
city. The event - being sent to the asylum - is subordinated by the
narrative, its meaning is subsumed within the 'meta'-narrative of
becoming a writer. Although Frame in her autobiography is always
open to the fictional possibilities of reality, she does stop short of
abusing those opportunities. She describes the first time she comes to
London after a very long and difficult journey: 'In spite of fictional
possibilities and enthusiasms, that first day in London was dreary and
uncomfortable' (The Envoy from Mirror City, p. 19).54
Frame's writing was what saved her from having a leucotomy and
spending the rest of her life in and out of mental institutions. Her
doctor hears that Frame has won a literary prize and decides she does
not need a leucotomy: 'It was my writing that at last came to my
rescue. It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it
actually saved my life. My mother had been persuaded to sign
permission for me to undergo leucotomy' (An Angel at My Table, p.
106). This is something that haunts her throughout her life; the
constant question 'what if?':
When I was eventually discharged from hospital, Nola

[who had a leucotomy] remained, and although she did
spend time out of hospital, she was often re-admitted; over
the years I kept in touch with her, and it was like living in a
fairytale where conscience, and what might-have-been, and
what was, not only speak but spring to life and become a
54 Henry F. May voices the opposite view that his writing could not
encompass the excitements in life: 'I had been told that this trip would be a
great experience and had resolved to keep a diary. In Chicago I duly and
pompously recorded my awe at the huge crowds rushing about, and with
great originality compared them to ants. This was the first and last entry in
the diary - life was much too interesting for conventional literary sentiments.'
Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), p. 45.
living companion, a reminder. (An Angel at My Table, p.

109)
This 'living companion' is an instance of counterfactual discourse in

autobiography: the possibilities, the 'what if?' made flesh. Frame also
writes the autobiography to dispel the myth that her first novel was
autobiographical, explaining that it was a parallel life, the possible life
she could have had, the life of Nola. This dramatic turn of events and
the possibilities that were averted through coincidence rather than any
rational cause, naturally lends itself very well to the dramatic account
that is the centre of Frame's autobiography. Writing for her becomes
almost a mythical activity, something that saved her life.55
Frame calls the world of fiction a 'mirror city' and describes her
writing life as a chance to travel there:
I could journey like a seasoned traveller to the Mirror City,

observing (not always consciously), listening, remembering
and forgetting. The only graveyard in Mirror City is the
graveyard of memories that are resurrected, reclothed with
reflection and change, their essence untouched. (A truthful
autobiography tries to record the essence. The renewal and
change are part of the material of fiction). (The Envoy from
Mirror City, p. 167)
In the third volume Frame dwells to a great extent on this metaphor of

the mirror city. It is a very personal myth and on occasion it is trying
55 Hlne Cixous writes a similarly mythical account of writing: 'It seems to

me that the story of writing always begins with hell. Just like the story of a
life. First with the hell of the ego, with this primitive primordial chaos that is
ours, these darknesses in which we struggle when we are young and from
which we also construct ourselves. On emerging from this hell, be it simply
the hell of the unconscious or a real hell, there is paradise. But what is
Paradise? Hell is incomprehension, it is dreadful mystery, and also the
demonic or demoniac feeling of beeing nothing, controlling nothing, of being
unformed, tiny, before the immense. And also being bad and sometimes evil.
Our wickedness is one of vertiginous themes that opens the space of writing.'
'From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History', trans. Deborah
W. Carpenter, in The Future of Literary Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London:
Routledge, 1989), pp. 1-18, p. 6.
134 Borderlines
for the reader to attempt to follow her meanderings through it. But as
a conclusion to her tale of troubles, and within the structure of the
autobiography, it brings cohesion to the trilogy as the mirror city
becomes her ultimate goal. It is 'the material of fiction' that records the
'essence' of her autobiography. When she is finally free from her
troubles, she can at last start her writing career: 'No longer, I hoped,
dependent on my 'schizophrenia' for comfort and attention and help,
but with myself as myself, I again began my writing career' (An Angel
at My Table, p. 129). The prerequisite is to be with herself as herself,
to be accepted but independent.
Frame often describes her problems as a question of finding an
identity that will make her able to live with 'herself as herself'. One of
the ways in which she attempts to find this after having lost so much
in the mental homes is to have her photograph taken:
The photograph was urgent, a kind of reinstating of myself

as a person, a proof that I did exist. In my ignorance of
book publication I had supposed that all books carried
photographs of their authors and I remembered my feeling,
when copies of The Lagoon were brought to me in hospital,
that I had no claim to the book, that there was not even a
photograph to help stake a claim. This, combined with my
erasure in hospital, seemed to set me too readily among the
dead who are no longer photographed; my years between
twenty and nearing thirty having passed unrecorded as if I
had never been. (An Angel at My Table, pp. 129-30)
Not only have the mental institutions eroded the little sense of identity
that she had, but they actually make her doubt that she was a writer
even though she had published a book.56
Cardinal's description of how she started writing half-way through
her psychoanalysis also evokes a sense of freedom and a love of
personal space:
56 A discussion of the role of the photograph is further developed in chapter

six.
En dehors de cela, la nuit et le matin trs tt, j'crivais. Cela

se faisait simplement, facilement. Je ne pensais mme pas
que j'crivais. Je prenais mon crayon, mon carnet, et je me
laissais aller divaguer. Pas comme sur le divan de
l'impasse. Les divagations de mes carnets taient faites
d'lments de ma vie que j'arrangeais comme cela me
plaisait, j'allais o je voulais, je vivais des instants que je
n'avais pas vcus mais que j'imaginais, je n'tais pas tenue
par le carcan de la vrit comme avec le docteur. Je me
sentais libre comme je ne l'avais jamais t. (Les Mots pour
le dire, p. 234)57
All of Cardinal's descriptions of writing talk of joy, freedom, and

independence. It is a continuation of the importance she places on
words in her autobiography and how, as in psychoanalysis, one can
use them to cure oneself and how writing her first book is a
'crystallization of 'les mots pour le dire' in prose: the creation of
artistic form for her thoughts, feelings and discoveries'.58 This
freedom in telling a story, whether it is moments one has only
imagined or a 'mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths', can
be seen to relate both to writing novels and autobiography.59
As talking and writing are part of Cardinal's cure, so is the life of
writing that the doctors, who finally examine Frame in London and
57 'It happened simply, easily. I didn't think I was writing, even. With pencil
and paper, I let my mind wander. Not like on the couch in the cul-de-sac. The
divagations in the notebooks were made up of the elements of my life which
were arranged according to my fancy: going where I pleased, living out
moments I had only imagined. I was not in the yoke of truth, as in analysis. I
was conscious of being more free than I had been.' p. 215.
58 Cairns, op. cit., p. 85.
59 This happens in other women's autobiographies as Michael Sheringham
explains regarding Violette Leduc: 'Writing has also restored Leduc to the
world, has helped her direct her attention to the beauty of the Provencal
landscape in which she composes her autobiography, and has delivered her
from 'engloutissement' in dead desires. The reader is asked to stand witness
to this accomplishment by becoming the recipient of a gift, the beneficiary of
the munificence Leduc is now capable of, after years of emotional avarice.'
French Autobiography: Devices and Desires (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993), p. 152.
136 Borderlines
conclude that she has never suffered from schizophrenia, recommend

for Frame:
Dr Cawley was clear: his prescription for my ideal life was

that I should live alone and write while resisting, if I wished
this, the demands of others to 'join in'. There had never
been any question of my not being able to exist in the 'real
world' unless that existence also deprived me of my 'own
world', the journeys to and from Mirror City, either by the
Envoy who is forever present, or by myself. (The Envoy
from Mirror City, p. 128)
It is no wonder that writing for Frame takes on such mythical

proportions, as it saves her from a life in mental institutions, and is
what keeps her out of them, and lets her be 'herself'. It is not only
writing that is important; it is the whole way of life that goes with it
that for Frame is the only possible and desirable life.
As for Cardinal, writing also touches other aspects of her life as she
claims that writing her first book reunited her with her husband and
gave her independence and happiness. She describes meeting the
editor when signing her first contract:
Et s'il avait su qu'il s'adressait la folle! Je ne pouvais

m'empcher de penser elle. Je l'imaginais telle qu'elle
tait il n'y avait pas si longtemps, nue, assise dans son sang
recroqueville sur elle-mme dans la nuit de la salle de
bains, entre le bidet et la baignore, grelottante, suante,
terrorise, incapable de vivre. Je t'ai tire de l ma vieille,
je t'ai tire de l! Cela tenait du miracle du conte de fes, de
la sorcellerie. Ma vie tait ntirement transforme. Non
seulement j'avais dcouvert le moyen de m'exprimer mais
j'avais trouv toute seule le chemin qui m'loignait de ma
famille, de mon milieu, me permettant ainsi de construire
un univers qui m'tait propre. (Les Mots pour le dire, pp.
249-50)60
60 'If only he had known he was addressing a madwoman! I couldn't help

thinking of her. I imagined her as she was not so very long ago, naked, sitting
in her blood, doubled over, crouching in the darkened bathroom between the
bidet and the bathtup, sweating, terrorized, incapable of living. It was me
The writing brings to life a fairy tale, unreal and utopian. Cardinal's
straight-forward and open account of what writing meant to her
mirrors exactly Frame's description of her life as a writer as what
saved her. It is not only full of love of freedom and independence and
praise for the possibility of self-expression, it is also full of pride that
they managed to come to this point where they can live on their own
terms. For Cardinal, after having fought so hard just to be able to
communicate with her doctor in those first tortuous chapters, she has
reached the stage where she can communicate and give something of
herself to others. It is a way of proving (to yourself and others) that
you are sane, and capable of giving something of your sane and
splendid self to others.
6. Utopia and Autobiography
Lucille Cairns points out that Cardinal's autobiography poses

questions about the relationship between fact and fiction and claims
that it 'raises fecund issues about the borderlines distinguishing fact
from personal mythology'.61 This, as I have already mentioned, is also
the case in Frame's autobiography. They both build their stories
around the notion of the liberation a life of writing offers and they
pick and choose events from their lives and memories that support this
structure. Cardinal's madness and her mother, inextricably linked,
serve as the stumbling block she has to overcome to be reborn; to be
able to give birth to herself. Frame's fight with doctors, institutions,
traditions, and claims to identity, mark her struggle to become a
writer. These stories in some sense offer personal mythologies of the
writers' past. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese proclaims that: 'In all fairness,
who pulled you out of there, my friend. I was the one! It was in the nature of
a miracle, out of a fairy tale, magic. My life was completely transformed. Not
only had I discovered a way to express myself, but on my own I had found a
road which took me away from my family and my background, allowing me
to build my own universe.' p. 230.
61 Cairns, op. cit., p. 77.
138 Borderlines
sex and race more readily lend themselves to symbolization than does
class, and thus they also more readily lend themselves to
representation, fabulation and myth.'62 The representation of writing
as liberation from madness and traditional female roles, and the
representation of the mother-daughter relationship, are almost raised
to the level of fabulation and myth in these works.
Gender plays a decisive role in these stories. The autobiographers'
lives, social positions, outlooks and relationships are all formed by it.
But is the mode of writing formed by it? They use words known from
the vocabulary of feminism to describe personal experiences. They
represent the mother as the symbol of everything they do not want to
be. She is the main obstacle towards the freedom they desire, but the
writers show a sense of guilt over their feelings of hatred and
repulsion. They are writing against the mother, but also for her and
with her. If women have been denied access to their own discourse,
and if by writing they take part in a male dominated field, the words
the authors use to describe it tell of liberation and freedom and not of
repression by that discourse.
Both Frame's and Cardinal's texts are almost utopian in their attitude
to the life of the writer. It is a utopia of wholeness and health against
the horrors of madness and repression. Mary Jacobus concludes in her
study of Irigaray and George Eliot that:
The necessary utopianism of feminist criticism may be the

attempt to declare what is by saying something else - that
'something else' which presses both Irigaray and Eliot to
conclude their very different works with an imaginative
reading beyond analytic and realistic modes to the
metaphors of unbounded female desire in which each finds
herself as a woman writing.63
The utopian tone of Frame's and Cardinal's description of writing are

reminiscent of this. They structure their autobiographies toward what
62 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, 'My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings

of Afro-American Women', in The Private Self, pp. 63-89, p. 66.
63 Jacobus, op. cit., p. 52.
Frame calls the 'third place' and 'mirror city'. The fictional aspects of
these texts lie in their handling of the myth of the mother; and in the
convention they embrace of the repressed talking in a voice of its own.
Their writing is unmistakably theirs and constitutes a wonderful
liberation, freedom, and independence. Their personal mythology
interacts clearly with feminist discourse.
Every other event in their lives is subordinated by the story of how
they became writers. Laura Marcus points out that:
In relation to autobiographical criticism more generally, I

would argue that conversion narratives have become the
staple of the genre because they control their reception by
asserting the supremacy of an enlightened present moment,
perspective and consciousness. In other words, there is no
possibility of an oppositional reading, because the
perspective from which the autobiographer writes is
represented as the only one which renders the past
intelligible.64
Both Frame's and Cardinal's texts contain this aspect of the conversion
narrative. The trajectory the texts follow from madness to writing is
represented in these texts as the only possible interpretation of their
lives. Control over the reception is a large factor as they represent the
writing as having saved them from madness, and oppositional reading
becomes impossible, as their perspective is the only one that will
explain their lives.
These texts demarcate yet another area where autobiography and
fiction interact. By representing their lives in such stark terms,
creating such a myth of origin with its theme of struggle and
liberation, the autobiographers inevitably highlight the fictional
aspects of such a narrative. They create a personal mythology based in
fact with the issue of gender at its core.
64Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 168.
Chapter Four
Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures
Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori
Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other
times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous
and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory
for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of
finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again
our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide
us with such angles.1
There is no point in my getting so excited. Of course, I will not

convince these teenagers in this Vancouver classroom that
Poland is the center of the universe rather than a gray patch of
land inhabited by ghosts. It is I who will have to learn how to
live with a double vision [. . .] The reference points inside my
head are beginning to do a flickering dance. I suppose this is
the most palpable meaning of displacement. I have been
dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has
been shifted away from my center.2
1. Introduction: Writing with 'Double Vision'
Life-writing by writers who have emigrated offers an interesting

vantage point from which to view the relationship between
autobiography and fiction, as the authors have to bridge a gap between
two cultures, thereby highlighting the problem faced by all
autobiographers of straddling the divide between the past and the
present. Their 'long geographical perspective' and their displacement
from their reference points force them to live with what Eva Hoffman
calls 'double vision'. Salman Rushdie describes it thus:
1 Salman Rushdie, 'Imaginary Homelands', in Imaginary Homelands:

Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), pp. 9-21, p.
15.
2 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (London:
Minerva, 1991), p. 135. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
142 Borderlines
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we

have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common
humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I
suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-
of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form.
It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of
discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from
his past, of his being 'elsewhere'. This may enable him to
speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal
significance and appeal.3
The texts examined here engage in different ways with the

possibilities of representing the lost country of the past. They are Eva
Hoffman's autobiography, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New
Language (1989), where she describes her experience of emigrating
from Poland to Canada, and Michael Ondaatje's autobiographical
work Running in the Family (1982), where he recalls two visits he
made to his country of birth, Sri Lanka, many years after he settled in
Canada. I also look at Kyoko Mori's account of her visit to her home
country in The Dream of Water (1995). Hoffman describes the Jewish
community in Cracow and life in Canada and the United States, and
Ondaatje examines his Sri-Lankan origin from both a native's and a
foreigner's perspective. The texts are very different in style and
structure, but both authors write with what Hoffman calls 'double
vision'.4 Both texts, therefore, offer a dialogue between two different
cultures. In this chapter I look at how this 'double vision' engages with
the borderline between fiction and autobiography.
It seems inevitable that writers with an awareness of other cultural
norms are bound to question what others might perceive as certainties.
Race, nationality and identity gather different meaning and
3 Rushdie, op. cit., p. 12.

4 William Boelhower explains that 'the autobiographical journey of the
immigrant protagonist inevitably leads to the juxtaposition and interaction of
two cultural topologies, due to the very mobility of the hyphenated
protagonist.' Autobiographical Transactions in Modernist America: The
Immigrant, The Architect, The Artist, The Citizen (Trieste: Del Bianco
Editore, 1992), pp. 14-15.
Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures 143
connotations as the immigrant writers move between two or more

kinds of interpretations of these terms.5 I believe it to be of interest to
see if these texts highlight the element of fictionality that is part of the
construction of our ideas about race, nationality and identity. As I
have mentioned, the texts deal with being foreign and native at the
same time, but do they attempt to reconcile these two aspects in
autobiography, and does the structure represent the ambivalence they
describe? Does the structure aim for a balance between the two
cultures, and also maybe between autobiography and fiction? This
questioning and ambivalence is given different form in each text:
Hoffman uses a model one could describe as a movement from
'paradise' to 'exile' to 'new world', while Ondaatje combines many
different genres - a fragmented text to describe a fragmented life.6
It interesting to see how the authors write an autobiography for their
new country. Autobiography is occupied with bringing a sense of the
past to the present, but these authors are also bringing their old world
to their present, new world, in both cases a very different culture.
Rushdie is aware of the problems this can pose:
5 As Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi point out: 'Race is about

everything - historical, political, personal - and race is about nothing - a
construct, an invention that has changed dramatically over time and historical
circumstance.' 'Introduction: Storytelling as Social Conscience: The Power of
Autobiography', in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity,
ed. B. Thompson and S. Tyagi (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. ix-xvii, p.
ix.
6 Sangeeta Ray maintains that 'the fragmented form of this narrative
functions less as a postmodernist experiment, reflecting rather the material
conditions of moving between cultures, nations, and generations.' 'Memory,
Identity, Patriarchy: Projecting a Past in the Memoirs of Sara Suleri and
Michael Ondaatje', Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993) 37-58 (p. 43). But
Linda Hutcheon places this text firmly in a postmodernist context when she
claims: 'Ondaatje's self-aware thematizing of the textuality of the past - when
it comes to you through books, records, and even memoirs - places Running
in the Family into the poststructuralist as wells as postmodernist context.'
'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge', in Spider Blues:
Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki (Montreal: Vehicule Press,
1985), pp. 301-314, p. 303.
144 Borderlines
It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or

expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to
reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into
pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in
the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties
- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably
means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely
the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions,
not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary
homelands, Indias of the mind.7
In looking at the 'imaginary homelands' the authors create, and how

they search there for their identity, I hope to show how this inevitably
involves a degree of fictionality. Language, in this context, is, of
course, of major significance and that factor informs Hoffman's
autobiography. Hoffman describes in her text, as the title suggests, her
move from one language to another and the effect that move had on
her life. Coming to Canada she attempts to 'translate herself' from
Polish to English with great difficulty. One could say that in writing
on her Polish past in English she is repeating that process of
translation. But can the autobiographical process enable the authors to
devise ways to bring together double identities - made up of two
languages, two homelands?
I look at how these texts represent the authors' experience of
emigrating, and how the authors describe their travels back to their
homelands. I examine what 'profound uncertainties' they come across
when writing on their homelands, and whether they are creating
'imaginary homelands'. In this respect I focus on their descriptions of
landscape and how it illuminates the difference between the native
and the foreign. I explore what happens when the authors cross
borders - from one country to another - in immigration or travel, and
change from one language to another, and how that affects their
identity, and their attempts at describing that identity in
autobiography.

When writing on their homelands immigrant writers can become

mapmakers as they introduce new areas of the world to other parts of
it. They also seek to trace their identity in their original culture, which
is a common pursuit for writers. In the previous chapter I discussed
how Janet Frame's autobiography is centred around her battle to find
the means and the confidence to speak out into the world. One aspect
of that is how literature from her homeland was perceived. Coming
from New Zealand, Frame is already marginalised, as there literature
from England constituted the canon, the 'real literature', while native
attempts were hardly discussed. Frame is troubled by a lack of identity
not only because of the years spent in mental homes, but also because
of her cultural background: 'There was such a creation as New
Zealand literature; I chose to ignore it, and indeed was scarcely aware
of it. Few people spoke of it, as if it were a shameful disease.'8 Frame
equals the status of literature from New Zealand to her own mental
problems; it is unmentionable and it is not until she is in her early
twenties that she discovers stories from New Zealand: 'The stories [. .
.] overwhelmed me by the fact of their belonging. It was almost a
feeling of having been an orphan who discovers that her parents are
alive and living in the most desirable home - pages of prose and
poetry' (An Angel at My Table, p. 68). This discovery does give her
confidence but when she comes to London she finds West Indian
literature much more exciting and tries to pass her writing off as West
Indian to get her poems published in London literary magazines. But
she soon finds out that 'in a sense my literary lie was an escape from a
national lie that left a colonial New Zealander overseas without any
real identity'.9
When Frame decides to go back to New Zealand and become a
writer in her homeland she describes the experience in terms of
freedom and opportunity:
8 Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (London: Picador, 1993) p. 67.

9 Janet Frame, The Envoy from Mirror City (London: Picador, 1993) p. 29.
146 Borderlines
Living in New Zealand, would be for me, like living in an

age of mythmakers; with a freedom of imagination among
all the artists because it is possible to begin at the beginning
and to know the unformed places and to help form them, to
be a mapmaker for those who will follow nourished by this
generation's layers of the dead. I was strongly influenced in
my decision by remembering, from time to time, Frank
Sargeson's words to me, 'Remember you'll never know
another country like that where you spent your earliest
years. You'll never be able to write intimately of another
country'. (The Envoy from Mirror City, p. 166)
There are two points made here: the first one is that the chance to play
a part in forming the literature of the 'new world', the chance to be a
'mythmaker', proves irresistible to Frame. She wants to be a
mapmaker or mythmaker, which for her seems to be the same thing.
Making up myths for a new literature means mapping out her culture;
she sees it both as a challenge and as an inevitability.10 The other
point Frame makes is that the writer is bound to write on his or her
country of origin. The need to write about the country one grew up in
is a strong one and can be seen in all the texts discussed here.
Autobiography is, of course, the perfect field for that and at times it
10 Jack Hodgins describes coming from a remote part of Canada in similar

terms: 'Gradually over the years of learning to read in school books I got a
very distinct impression that I lived in an invisible place that hadn't yet found
its way into the English language. Studying the literature of England and
America in later years as we did in school, I learned there too that the real
world was somewhere else and that we were not part of it, we were never
mentioned. And yet I looked around and I saw that I was surrounded by
people whose lives were every bit as interesting and exciting and joyful and
tragic as lives of the people in the stories and poems and plays that I loved.
And I had the feeling that later on when I tried to put some of the stories
down on the page I was attempting to knock on the door and say "Eh, World!
I know some very interesting people that you've never heard about and I'd
like to introduce you to them. Because I like them"' Jack Hodgins in Anna
Rutherford, 'Introducing the Writers', in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian
Fiction, ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp. 24-41, p.
31.
can serve as a vehicle for bringing the old world to the new, as well as
the past to the present.
Paul John Eakin explains that 'one model for the history of the genre
[of autobiography] in the United States might well be the ongoing
interplay between dominant and marginal texts'.11 And in immigrant
autobiographies one can see the interplay between dominant and
marginal countries, languages and identities. But one needs to be
careful not to see these authors as necessarily representative of their
ethnic group or nationality as Betty Bergland points out:
since ideologies are also embedded in metaphors and

dreamwork, ethnics may also articulate prevailing
ideologies in these terms. Thus I suggest we need to
question any easy relationship between discourse and the
speaking subject, particularly the assumption that
experience produces a voice - that, for example, being
woman means speaking in a woman's voice.12
Thus I will not approach the texts in the terms of which ethnic groups
Hoffman and Ondaatje belong to, but concentrate more on how the
experience of journeying between cultures informs the style and
structure of the texts.
2. The Structure of Double Vision
Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation follows to a large extent the

pattern of what one could call conventional autobiography. It tells the
story of Hoffman's life from her childhood up to the time of her
writing the autobiography in a more or less chronological order. Born
11 Paul John Eakin, 'Introduction', in American Autobiography: Retrospect

and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1991), pp. 3-25, p. 10.
12 Betty Bergland, 'Postmodernism and the Autobiographical Subject:
Reconstructing the "Other"', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds.
Kathleen Ashley, et al. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994),
pp. 130-166, p. 134.
148 Borderlines
in 1946 in Poland to Jewish parents, who through a mixture of

incredible resourcefulness and luck had managed to survive the war,
Hoffman emigrated with her family from Poland to Canada at the age
of thirteen. The text is divided into three parts, entitled 'Paradise',
'Exile', and 'New World'. The book describes how unhappy Hoffman
was leaving Poland, it depicts her struggle as a teenager in the new
country, and finally how she slowly came to terms with her new world
as an adult. The text revolves around her experience of moving
between cultures through language and I believe, therefore, that it is
relevant to discuss what structure she chooses for her story and how
her story of living with 'double vision' has affected the writing of the
autobiography.
Andrei Codrescu points out how moving between cultures can offer
the perfect structure for autobiography and how it influenced his own:
I'd changed countries and languages at the age of nineteen,

a neat break that could provide a thousand books with
rudimentary structure. In addition, I had the numbers: born
in 1946, became conscious with the Hungarian revolt in
1956, came to the United States in 1966. Initiatory
structures in plain view, natural chapter breaks for the
taking.13
These 'natural chapter breaks' are what Hoffman bases the structure of
her autobiography on. William Boelhower claims that immigrant
autobiographies all follow the same fabula which he describes as a
chronological ordering of the plot made up of three central moments:
'anticipation of the New World, contact with it, and the contrasting of
Old World and New World'.14 Hoffman's text follows this pattern as
she consciously models her text on early twentieth century immigrant
13 Andrei Codrescu, 'Adding to My Life', in Autobiography and

Postmodernism, pp. 21-30, p. 23.
14 Boelhower, op. cit., p. 14. Boelhower has been criticised for not
differentiating between first and second generation immigrant autobiography,
see for instance Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, 'Immigrant Autobiography: Some
Questions of Definition and Approach', in American Autobiography, pp. 142-
170.
autobiography. The chapter headings are deliberate evocations of turn-

of-the-century immigrant autobiographies, for instance Mary Antin's
The Promised Land (1912). They also refer to the belief that leaving
childhood is equivalent to being exiled from paradise, as Hoffman
leaves Poland when she is thirteen. These connections to earlier works
also highlight that Hoffman is describing what many others have
experienced and written on before her, but her treatment of these
experiences is more coloured by contemporary themes, such as
dislocation, problems of identity, the psychological impact of crossing
borders, and language, rather than by earlier themes of hardship,
success and assimilation.
Hoffman describes leaving Poland in very poetic terms as being
thrown into exile, and she is full of longing and despair:
I am suffering my first, severe attack of nostalgia, or

tesknota - a word that adds to nostalgia the tonalities of
sadness and longing. It is a feeling whose shades and
degrees I'm destined to know intimately, but at this
hovering moment, it comes upon me like a visitation from a
whole new geography of emotions, an annunciation of how
much an absence can hurt [. . .] Looking ahead, I come
across an enormous, cold blankness - a darkening, an
erasure, of the imagination, as if a camera eye has snapped
shut, or as if a heavy curtain has been pulled over the
future. Of the place where we're going - Canada - I know
nothing. (Lost in Translation, p. 4)
This passage expounds many of the themes of the autobiography. The

English language, which is to pose many problems for her, is of no
use to her when she describes her feelings. It emphasises her acute
sense of loss (of childhood and of country), and the 'enormous' but at
the same time 'empty' Canada, and the 'whole new geography of
emotions' she has to deal with. Hoffman's use of the present tense
adds immediacy to this otherwise very literary description, perhaps
too literary for a thirteen year old. This passage sets the tone for the
chapter on her childhood that follows. The whole 'Paradise' section is
coloured by tesknota, by the knowledge of impending exile.
150 Borderlines
Another important factor in this transition is the difference between

how Hoffman's parents felt about the event and the loss she felt. Her
parents were going to the 'promised land' but she feels she is leaving
paradise:
Perhaps in another few years I might have come to feel the

same way; perhaps the abstract issues of a collective
identity would have developed an intimate logic that would
have propelled me outward; perhaps. But for now, I hardly
have an identity, except that most powerful one of first,
private loves. (Lost in Translation, p. 88)
This first powerful identity is what Hoffman loses, as it cannot be

sustained in a completely different culture, without the people and the
places that formed that identity. For her parents the experience is very
different. Their sense of identity is based on their experiences as Jews
in Poland, and therefore they have no choice but to leave. Almost all
of their Jewish friends in Cracow, or more to the point the few who
survived the war, are leaving. For Hoffman's parents and their friends
there is no sense in staying in Poland, it is only a question of where to
go: Israel or America. This difference between public and private
senses of identity, between childhood and adult identity, is
emphasised in this text. So the descriptions of Poland as a childhood
paradise, and the representation of moving to Canada as being thrown
into exile, are all stated in private terms and not in a political context.
Hoffman describes the move to Canada in terms of becoming an adult
and, in an almost violent fashion, being robbed of her childhood.
Hoffman's loss is acute and her sense of the past is rooted in that loss.
It is her experience of being a child in Poland that is at the forefront,
rather than the political ramifications of being a Jew in Poland after
the war.
Hoffman is well aware of the millions of others who have
experienced this before her and she looks to literature to make sense
of it. It is clear from the start, both from the structure of the work and
direct references to other autobiographies that it is very consciously
informed by other texts. She mentions another immigrant's
autobiography to explain her experience of exile:
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov makes the poetic, or the

playful, speculation that Russian children before the
Revolution - and his exile - were blessed with a surfeit of
sensual impressions to compensate them for what was to
come. Of course, fate doesn't play such premonitory games,
but memory can perform retrospective manoeuvres to
compensate for fate. Loss is a magical preservative. Time
stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent
impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The
house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever
as you remember them. Nostalgia - that most lyrical of
feelings - crystallizes around these images like amber.
Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made
more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its
stillness. (Lost in Translation, pp. 114-15)
This corresponds to Rushdie's thinking on 'imaginary homelands'. The

past becomes completely dislocated from the present, the images live
on, but not the reality. The first part of Hoffman's autobiography is
coloured by this. She describes places, people, and events in such
nostalgic terms that her home country seems very unreal, almost a
literary prototype for a childhood paradise, with the games, the loves,
the neighbours, the friends all described with a constant awareness of
the dramatic disruption to come. The first part ends aboard the ship to
Canada, a journey that is described as a short respite from reality, and
the second part starts on a train station in Montreal. In the second part
Hoffman describes her first years in Canada in terms of feeling out of
place, of lacking an identity, of not being able to express herself in her
new language, of the constant sense of loss. And in the last part she
describes how she slowly finds her way in the language and culture,
accepts it and is accepted by it. Hoffman achieves a kind of cohesion
by using this model, this literary device of stark opposites, to come to
terms with her loss, her exile, her search for identity.
But despite what at first seems a straightforward structure Hoffman
is wary of simplifying the difficulties she encounters. Although she
uses the paradise - exile - new world model or what Boelhower calls
'anticipation', 'contact', and 'contrast', she is aware of how the world
152 Borderlines
has changed. The latter part of the twentieth century does not offer
easy solutions to the fragmentation of identity, to the multiple
perspectives on language and the self, and where purpose and
meaning have become problematic concepts. At the end of the 'Exile'
chapter where she is about to move to the United States to go to
college, Hoffman talks about the world she is about to enter, the
American campus in the sixties:
I cannot conceive of my story as one of simple progress, or

simple woe. Any confidently thrusting story line would be a
sentimentality, an excess, an exaggeration, an untruth.
Perhaps it is my intolerance of those, my cherishing of
uncertainty as the only truth that is, after all, the best
measure of my assimilation; perhaps it is in my misfittings
that I fit. Perhaps a successful immigrant is an exaggerated
version of the native. From now on, I'll be made, like a
mosaic, of fragments - and my consciousness of them. It is
only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all,
an immigrant. (Lost in Translation, p. 164)
Hoffman believes that it is only in her own consciousness of this

fragmentation that she remains an immigrant, in her double vision.
Here it is as if the cohesion offered by the structure of the work is
denied in the text. She claims to be 'made of fragments', but the
structure of the work does not mirror that claim. The structure has not
got the contours of a mosaic, and even if one would be hard pressed to
describe the text as having a 'confidently thrusting story line', it still
describes a progress, albeit a tentative one, and not as simplistic as the
chapter headings might suggest.
Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is a much more
fragmented text and does not follow a straight-forward trajectory.
From the first it focuses not on his life, but on his parents, their youth
and their marriage. It describes two visits the author made to the
country of his birth, Sri Lanka, many years after he emigrated. He
goes there to visit relatives and to try to get to know more about his
late father. Ondaatje left the country when he was nine years old and it
is only many years later when he is already a writer in Canada that he
decides to make the journey back. In Sri Lanka he talks to relatives
and people who knew his family, looks at photographs, examines

archives and church records to learn about his ancestors and he
includes references to books on Sri Lanka by European travellers.
The text includes snatches of conversation with his sisters and
brother, stories about his family which his aunts tell him, photographs,
and quotations from other travellers. The text is divided into six main
sections, which are each divided into shorter subsections. Near the
middle of the text there are four poems. This gives an indication of the
many genres Ondaatje draws from in this work: the memoir, the
travel-journal, diary, poetry, biography, and the novel. This text
exemplifies the many possibilities of autobiography; how it can
encompass different methods and genres and at the same time be
unmistakably autobiographical. It is a portrait of a family, and of an
era in a country's history, of its landscape and weather. It is also a
study of how one can know and write on one's family and ancestors,
and how one knows one's country instinctively while also being an
outsider, a visitor, a traveller. The underlying concern is how one's
identity is in part formed by a knowledge and understanding of one's
family history.
Ondaatje does not discuss his own life in any detail, but it is
nevertheless an autobiographical text as he is searching for his roots,
the childhood he claims to have forgotten, and the father he never
knew as an adult. The biographical details about his relatives are not
included for their own sake, but as a part of a quest for his own
identity. The title suggests this as he is investigating what 'runs' in his
family. Ondaatje goes about this search with all the literary facilities
available to him; through the travel-journal, through poetry, through
descriptions of dreams and visions, through biography, through story-
telling. This text, therefore, can be seen as a quest not only for
Ondaatje's roots, but also for the best medium in which to represent
them. The word 'running' in the title also suggests his travels, and his
running away from Canada.
There are two main strands in this text: firstly a travel journal with
descriptions of landscape and country, and secondly stories of his
family. Some of the stories Ondaatje tells show clearly how he works
with facts to make up a story or a passage of impressive prose. His
154 Borderlines
grandmother Lalla died in a flood and he describes her death as if he

had been floating with her toward her death:
Below the main street of Nuwara Eliya the land drops

suddenly and Lalla fell into deeper waters, past the houses
of 'Cranleigh' and 'Ferncliff'. They were homes she knew
well, where she had played and argued over cards. The
water here was rougher and she went under for longer and
longer moments coming up with a gasp and then pulled
down like bait, pulled under by something not comfortable
any more, and then there was the great blue ahead of her,
like a sheaf of blue wheat, like a large eye that peered
towards here, and she hit it and was dead.15
In this way the text constantly crosses the borderline between

autobiography and fiction. The facts are there but they are made into
passages of beautiful prose, exciting stories or tragic tales. The first
indication the reader gets that this is not an 'ordinary' autobiography is
the map of Sri Lanka on the flyleaf in the manner of a good travel
journal. On the facing page there are two quotations that are important
here. The first is from a fourteenth-century text by the Franciscan
friar, Oderic: ''I saw in this island fowls as big as our country geese
having two heads . . . and other miraculous things which I will not
here write of.'' And another from a Sri Lankan newspaper from 1978:
'The Americans were able to put a man on the moon because they
knew English. The Sinhalese and Tamils whose knowledge of English
was poor, thought that the earth was flat.' It exposes an ignorance on
both sides: the way Europeans represented foreign lands as full of
'miraculous things' and vicious natives, and the legacy of the colonial
language, which is the key to all knowledge (and in which Ondaatje
writes his autobiography). These two sets of views Ondaatje
15 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), p.

129. (Hereafter quoted in the text.) Ondaatje's brother Christopher has
disputed this description of their grandmother's death in his own book,
claiming she died of alchohol poisoning and her death as therefore being
more tragic than his brother describes it. See Christopher Ondaatje, The Man-
Eater of Punanai: A Journey of Discovery to the Jungles of Old Ceylon
(London: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 66.
juxtaposes throughout the text. The views of Europeans who did not
understand and could not cope with the country, and the views of the
ones who stayed, intermarried and became part of the country. The
inclusion of both views points to the conflicting feelings Ondaatje has
about his home country, and to how his knowledge of it comes as
much from other writings as from the people who live there and his
own experience.
It is clear throughout the text, not only in the poetry sections, that
Ondaatje is a poet. One can see it in the many lyrical titles of the
sections, and many of the sections are somewhere midway between
poetry and prose. Dreams, fantastic stories, and visions, what is
usually considered the stuff of fiction, make up a large part of this
autobiographical text. Even Ondaatje's reason for going back is
represented as a decision taken halfway between a dream and a
drunken stupor. The text begins with a chapter called 'Asian Rumours'
in a section called 'Asia' with a description of how he came to travel
back to Sri Lanka:
What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could

hardly hold onto. I was sleeping at a friend's house. I saw
my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them
were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape.
The noises woke me [. . .] It was a new winter and I was
already dreaming of Asia.
Once a friend had told me that it was only when I was
drunk that I seemed to know exactly what I wanted. And
so, two months later, in the midst of the farewell party in
my growing wildness - dancing, balancing a wine glass on
my forehead and falling to the floor twisting round and
getting up without letting the glass tip, a trick which
seemed only possible when drunk and relaxed - I knew I
was already running. Outside the continuing snow had
made the streets narrow, almost impassable. Guests had
arrived on foot, scarved, faces pink and frozen. They leaned
against the fire-place and drank.
I had already planned the journey back. During quiet
afternoons I spread maps onto the floor and searched out
possible routes to Ceylon. But it was only in the midst of
this party, among my closest friends, that I realised I would
be travelling back to the family I had grown from - those
relations from my parents' generation who stood in my
156 Borderlines
memory like frozen opera. I wanted to touch them into

words. A perverse and solitary desire. In Jane Austen's
Persuasion I had come across the lines, 'she had been
forced into prudence in her youth - she learned romance as
she grew older - the natural sequence of an unnatural
beginning.' In my mid-thirties I realised I had slipped past a
childhood I had ignored and not understood. (Running in
the Family, pp. 21-22)
This is a description of the birth of the text we have before us and I

quote it at length as it seems to me to point to the themes and motifs
that characterise Running in the Family. Ondaatje often starts a
paragraph or a chapter with a description of a dream which then leads
him to his themes. His drunken state points to the stories about his
father that we hear later on. As Ondaatje tries to decide on the route to
take to Sri Lanka, so he is also attempting to find a way back to his
family and his childhood. Throughout the text the reader mainly sees
the country in terms of his family, and his family as a product of the
country. Ondaatje emphasises the romanticism of his decision as he
quotes Austen and indicates how it is never possible to go back to
childhood. The passage also reminds us of the difference between
Canada, which has become 'impassable' in the cold winter, and his
home country. It seems that there he describes living in two places at
once; partying in Canada with his friends, but his mind is already in
Sri Lanka, he is dreaming of Asia. He wants to bring the images that
are frozen in time, in much the same way as Hoffman describes them,
to life, by 'touching them into words'. Writing the autobiography itself
is, therefore, an integral part of this quest, as the decision to travel and
to write about his travels were partly one and the same.
Ondaatje seems more interested in trying to find out what kind of
people his relatives were, rather than in recording details such as
dates. He does not describe in any detail his journeys to Sri Lanka. It
is only at the end of the book that one learns that he took two separate
journeys, one on his own and another he made with his wife and
children. In the first sections of the text he describes visits to relatives
to hear stories from the past to collect material for his book. It is
interesting that the way he hears the stories of his family becomes as
important as the stories themselves. It is only when spending time

with his relatives that he finds what he is looking for on his travels.
Ondaatje describes how his Aunt makes all his travels worthwhile,
he calls her 'the minotaur of this long journey back' and 'the minotaur
who inhabits the place one had been years ago, who surprises one with
conversations about the original circle of love' (Running in the Family,
p. 25). He quotes stories about other Ondaatjes; about intrigues,
affairs, love, drink and death. The stories are all colourful, fantastic,
shrouded in the mysteries of a bygone era:
In half an hour the others will waken from their sleep and
intricate conversations will begin again. In the heart of this
250-year-old fort we will trade anecdotes and faint
memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and
asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull of a
ship. No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or
funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and
retell the story with additions and this time a few
judgements thrown in. In this way history is organized.
(Running in the Family, p. 26)
The stories are told and retold, and then written down, and in 'this way
history is organized'. His aunts hold the key to his family's past, and
Ondaatje is fascinated by their stories. The relationship between fact
and fiction and the part storytelling plays in that is of note here.
Ondaatje often mentions this love of stories, of sitting with other
people and trading stories and thereby sharing more than just facts
about his relatives. It seems that the effect of the stories is to make him
feel a part of something larger, that what he does (or what he is, being
a writer) makes sense when he knows about his family background.
He describes visions, or dreams, interspersed with humorous
anecdotes but never tries to interpret these anecdotes or give
explanations for them. He allows the images to speak for themselves.
He illustrates his points with these dreams without ever giving a full
explanation.16 Ondaatje describes being in the midst of the process of
16 A description of a vision he has about his family is typical of this style:

'That night, I will have not so much a dream as an image that repeats itself. I
158 Borderlines
discovering his family and at this point the text is optimistic and
joyful.
Ondaatje is trying to understand the period when his parents were
young. This period was for him an incomprehensible muddle. In a
section called 'Tropical gossip' he tries to make sense of everything he
has heard about the youth of his parents' generation, all the gossip
about affairs and intrigues; all the time and money spent on parties and
games, but in the end he is dissatisfied with the gossip: 'I still cannot
break the code of how 'interested in' or 'attracted' they were to each
other. Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end
nothing of personal relationships' (Running in the Family, p. 53). He
gets caught up in the stories, but ultimately they are not sufficient.
Ondaatje is in the end disappointed by the stories he hears, he cannot
find the truth in them, he does not get to know fully what he came to
find out: 'Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? [. . .] And why
do I want to know of this privacy? [. . .] I want to sit down with
someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost
history like that deserving lover' (Running in the Family , p. 54). The
tone of the text is changing: he is becoming aware that perhaps he will
not find out all that he hoped for at the outset, but the stories still hold
a fascination for him.
The reader can never be sure if Ondaatje is narrating the stories
about his family as he heard them from his relatives or whether he has
considerably added to them himself. His description above of how
see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realise
gradually I am part of a human pyramid. Below me are other bodies that I am
standing on and above me are several more, though I am quite near the top.
With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living
room to the other. We are all chattering away like the crows and cranes so
that it is often difficult to hear. I do catch one piece of dialogue. A Mr
Hobday has asked my father if he has any Dutch antiques in the house. And
he replies, 'Well . . . there is my mother.' My grandmother lower down gives
a roar of anger. But at this point we are approaching the door which being
twenty feet high we will be able to pass through only if the pyramid turns
sideways. Without discussing it the whole family ignores the opening and
walks slowly through the pale pink rose coloured walls into the next room.'
Running in the Family, p. 27.
history is organised should, however, give us a clue. Ondaatje does

not usually give the reader much detail. His emphasis is on the poetic
side of the lives he describes. But storytelling and fictionalising are
part of his family tradition and Sri Lankan culture. He says about his
mother:
She belonged to a type of Ceylonese family whose women

would take the minutest reaction from another and blow it
up into a tremendously exciting tale, then later use it as an
example of someone's strain of character. If anything kept
their generation alive it was this recording by exaggeration.
Ordinary tennis matches would by mythologized to the
extent that one player was so drunk that he almost died on
the court. An individual would be eternally remembered for
one small act that in five years had become so magnified he
was just a footnote below it. The silence of the tea estates
and no doubt my mother's sense of theatre and romance[...]
combined the edited delicacies of fiction with the last era of
a colonial Ceylon. (Running in the Family, p. 169)
So the storytelling is not only a part of his upbringing and culture but
a remnant of a specific era; the era Ondaatje tries to evoke in the text.
He evokes that era not only by describing what life was like in those
times, but also in the way he tells the stories. He achieves this
evocation with exaggeration, as the stories of his eccentric
grandmother illustrate perfectly, and with a sense of theatre and
romance. He describes this type of storytelling as a characteristic of
the family's women, but he has wholly appropriated it in this text. He
has re-entered the role of story-telling. He adds a telling paragraph
with the acknowledgements and references at the end of the book:
While all these names may give an air of authenticity, I

must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or
'gesture'. And if those listed above disapprove of the
fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a
160 Borderlines
well-told lie is worth a thousand facts. (Running in the

Family, p. 206)17
Ondaatje constantly points out the difficulties of autobiographical

writing, the blurred borderline between fiction and autobiography, the
difficulty of knowing an 'intimate' truth many years after the fact, and
the problems of relating that truth to others. But it is not only by
telling stories that he tries to get to know his family. It is almost as if
he gets carried away with the stories of his colourful family; his
grandmother's antics, the affairs, the loves and games these people
played. His use of secondary material at times suggests the difficulty
of knowing the past. In a section one and a half pages long entitled
'Honeymoon' which refers to his parents' honeymoon, he says nothing
of their honeymoon but lists headlines from papers around the world
from the period: 'The lepers of Colombo went on hunger strike, a
bottle of beer cost one rupee, and there were upsetting rumours that
ladies were going to play at Wimbledon in shorts' (Running in the
Family, p. 37). None of this says anything about what his parents'
honeymoon was like. It emphasises the difference between the public
knowledge available in archives and libraries and the elusive nature of
private truths.18 Near the end of the book Ondaatje quotes his sisters
and brother. It shows how difficult it is to render faithfully anything
about one's own family, the relationships and histories. His sister says:
''I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said
17 Geert Lernout connects this to ethnicity in the Ondaatje's novels:

'Literature has always positioned itself in the force-field between truth and
lies, between curses and blessings, between the power of words and their
impotence, between the familiar voice on the one hand and on the other the
unfamiliar, unheimliche voice, the ethnic voice.' 'Unfamiliar Voices in
Ondaatje's First Two Novels', in Multiple Voices: Recent Canadian Fiction,
ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney: Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp. 91-102, p. 93.
18 As Linda Hutcheon argues in her discussion of what she calls
'historiographic metafiction': 'As readers, we see both the collecting and the
attempt to make narrative order. Historiographic metafiction acknowledges
the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us
today.' A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988), p. 114.
what a wonderful childhood we must have had, and I said it was a

nightmare'' (Running in the Family, p. 178).
The one person Ondaatje is really interested to know more about is
his father and the chapters about him are more sombre in tone than the
others. His parents divorced when he was very young. His father
drank, and when he did so became utterly uncontrollable. He took
endless, and it seems aimless, train rides, and made every kind of
mischief imaginable. Ondaatje describes an incident when his father
jumped off a train and stopped it by running into the tunnel the train
was approaching:
My mother, clutching a suit of civilian clothing (the Army

would not allow her to advertise his military connections),
walked into that darkness, finding him and talking with him
for over an hour and a half. A moment only Conrad could
have interpreted [. . .] They had been married for six years.
By mentioning Conrad, Ondaatje highlights that sometimes only

fiction can fill in the gaps, only Conrad could have described what
happened to these two people in that tunnel. Ondaatje tries hard to
understand, to make sense of, this 'heart of darkness' in his parents'
lives. But ultimately it seems impossible to make any sense of severe
alcoholism other than to see how destructive it is. It ruined his parents'
marriage and thereby cut him away from his father. The later sections
in the text are preoccupied with his father and his parents' marriage.
The tone is darker, the stories stop being fantastic and hilarious, they
become overpowering and tragic. These are, I believe, the most
poignant episodes in the book.
Ondaatje left the country when he was very young and was never to
see his father again. His father was destined to remain distant from his
family:
Before my mother left for England in 1949 she went to a

fortune-teller who predicted that while she would continue
to see each of her children often for the rest of her life, she
would never see them all together again. This turned out to
be true. Gillian stayed in Ceylon with me, Christopher and
162 Borderlines
Janet went to England. I went to England, Christopher went

to Canada, Gillian came to England, Janet went to America,
Gillian returned to Ceylon, Janet returned to England, I
went to Canada. Magnetic fields would go crazy in the
presence of more than three Ondaatjes. And my father.
Always separate until he died, away from us. The north
pole. (Running in the Family, p. 172)
The text is a quest for his father, an exploration of the 'north pole'.
Not only the journey itself, but writing the text as well. Ondaatje
attempts to touch his father into words and with 'the mercy of distance
write the histories':
During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see

ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were
destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy
camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies,
and with 'the mercy of distance' write the histories.
Ondaatje attempts to turn tragedy into history and thereby minimise

the chaos with explanations, with words. This is his ultimate loss and
one he can never compensate for. At times it is as if he is writing on
behalf of his family, for his father, to let him know that he is
remembered, though ultimately unknowable. What I find most
interesting in the text, is how it grapples with the storytelling tradition
and how Ondaatje uses it both to get to know his family and to
understand the period they lived in. We must remember that this is an
autobiographical text that mostly concerns itself with events that
happened before the author was born. It still is not a biography of
either his father or his mother, but an attempt at understanding where
he comes from, both in terms of the country and the family.
Ondaatje is interested in the way stories are told, how history is
organised, how memory works, and what it means to be a foreigner
and a native at the same time. The text is a fascinating study of the
relationship between autobiography and fiction as the author
experiments with the norms of genre to tell the story as he attempts to
find out where he comes from. In some ways he fails in his task; he
still does not know his father, intimate truths escape him, personal
relationships get lost in the gossip and rumours. There is no final truth
or neat ending, the literariness of the text does not extend that far.
3. Life in a New Language
The question of language is of special significance in

autobiographies by immigrants, especially if the language they write
in is different from their mother tongue.19 That is the case in
Hoffman's autobiography, as she describes having to live her life in a
new language from the age of thirteen. The title of the book refers to
this transitional period in her life, when she loses one language before
she has gained another. She describes this period as a very frightening
experience; she associates losing a language with losing her 'self', her
Polish identity, her life and loves in Poland, and her childhood. Paul
John Eakin maintains that:
if autobiographical discourse encourages us to place self

before language, cart before horse, the fact of our readiness
to do so suggests that the power of language to fashion
selfhood is not only successful but life-sustaining,
necessary to the conduct of human life as we know it.20
19 G. Thomas Couser says about Maxine Hong Kingston's and Richard

Rodrigues's autobiographical writings: 'In both cases, the ethnic language is
experienced as an obstacle to full selfhood as an American: in making the
transition from private (family) life to public life (in school), from Chinese or
Spanish to English, both suffered temporary speech impediments. Both
eventually broke through the language barrier to become exceptionally
literate and well-educated in English, as is demonstrated by their success as
writers; however, both recognized that in writing autobiography, they broke
powerful cultural proscriptions. (Indeed, both books are dedicated to parents
who either cannot read or cannot accept their autobiographical writing.)
Thus, while both are "success stories," both associate pain, loss, and
confusion with their assimilation.' Altered Egos: Authority in American
Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 213.
20 Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-
Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 191.
164 Borderlines
Hoffman describes her loss of paradise in terms of loss of language. It

is a border that takes her many years to cross, and it is the loss she
finds most difficult to accept. On one level her loss of language
bestows her with a linguistic knowledge - the relativity of language -
which for her is more than an abstract notion; it is a living reality. The
words become dislodged from reality, they are not reality anymore,
they could be anything. Hoffman explains that 'this radical disjoining
between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world
not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances - its very
existence. It is the loss of a living connection' (Lost in Translation, p.
107).
This loss of connection, of significance, epitomises her experience
of immigration.21 The loss of language stands in for what she lost
when she left Poland; the living connection to the past, and writing an
autobiography is one way of re-establishing that connection. She gives
her childhood back the 'colors, striations, nuances - its very existence'
by writing about it in her new language. On another level her loss of
language means a loss of identity, a diminished sense of self, and she
emphasises how an inability to express oneself can have dramatic
consequences:
Linguistic dispossession is a sufficient motive for violence,

for it is close to the dispossession of one's self. Blind rage,
helpless rage is rage that has no words - rage that
overwhelms one with darkness. And if one is perpetually
without words, if one exists in the entropy of
inarticulateness, that condition itself is bound to be an
enraging frustration [. . .] Anger can be borne - it can even
be satisfying - if it can gather into words and explode in a
storm, or a rapier-sharp attack. But without this means of
ventilation, it only turns back inward, building and swirling
like a head of steam - building to an impotent, murderous
rage. If all therapy is speaking therapy - a talking cure -
21 Other things also get lost in Hoffman's crossing: 'there's no doubt about it;
after the passage across the Atlantic, I've emerged as less attractive, less
graceful, less desirable.' Lost in Translation, p. 109.
then perhaps all neurosis is speech dis-ease. (Lost in

Translation, p. 124)
These two factors; losing a language, and thereby losing a connection

to the life that was lead in that language, leads to a loss of a sense of
self and identity. Hoffman describes that state before she has gained a
new sense of identity, and being unable to express herself in the terms
that come 'naturally'. At thirteen, Hoffman is silenced and she draws
attention to this in various ways throughout the text: ''Shut up,
shuddup,' the children around us are shouting, and it's the first word in
English that I understand from its dramatic context' (Lost in
Translation, p. 104). The loss of language is a powerful catalyst in
Hoffman's text; it is what she suffers most in losing, and what she
fights hardest to gain in the new world. She claims that her struggle
with language formed her life in every way. She describes falling in
love with a man because he spoke in ways that she envied. She
studied literature and made her living as a writer and editor, so her
new language in the end gives her a 'new world' identity. But as she
writes her life in English, she has established an identity, even if a
fragmented one, and thereby successfully translated herself.22
It is in the descriptions of losing a language and thereby losing a
connection to the past and slowly regaining that connection that the
text offers new insights, and introduces new territories on the
borderline between autobiography and fiction. Hoffman's dramatic
loss influences the structure of the autobiography, and her attempts at
regaining that lost world in her new language, by bringing her Polish
childhood to the new world, highlights how writing on the past
demands an attempt to create a bridge between the past and the
present, and in Hoffman's case between two different cultures, two
different languages. She visits her 'imaginary homeland' conscious
22 Salman Rushdie argues much the same point: 'Those of us who do use
English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that,
perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other
struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within
ourselves and the influence at work upon our societies. To conquer English
may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.' op. cit., p. 17.
166 Borderlines
that she is forever cut off from it, and thereby emphasises the fictional
element always present in writing on the past.
In the last chapter, 'New World', she resolves the difficulties she
describes in the 'Exile' chapter, her loss of identity and her loss of
'living connection' to her language. She describes attempts at building
an identity, to be part of the new world without losing her past
completely:
The gap cannot be fully closed, but I begin to trust English

to speak my childhood self as well, to say what has so long
been hidden, to touch the tenderest spots. Perhaps any
language, if pursued far enough, leads to exactly the same
place. And so, while therapy offers me instruments and the
vocabulary of self-control, it also becomes, in the long run,
a route back to that loss which for me is the model of all
loss, and to that proper sadness of which children are never
really afraid; in English, I wind my way back to my old,
Polish melancholy. When I meet it, I reenter myself, fold
myself again in my own skin. (Lost in Translation, p. 274)
The text itself is proof enough that Hoffman has embraced her new
language, if not entirely her new world. She still has reservations
about the life she leads there, although she is fully aware that there is
no turning back. In the last paragraph in the book she ties the final
loose strand, her connection to the language, the living connection of
it, the power of language to 'evoke', and in this way she embraces the
new world:
'Azalea,' I repeat. 'Forsythia, delphinium.' The names are

beautiful, and they fit the flowers perfectly. They are the
flowers, these particular flowers in this Cambridge garden.
For now, there are no Platonic azaleas, no Polish hyacinths
against which these are compared. I breathe in the fresh
spring air. Right now, this is the place where I'm alive. How
could there be any other place? Be here now, I think to
myself in the faintly ironic tones in which the phrase is
uttered by the likes of me. Then the phrase dissolves. The
brilliant colors are refracted by the sun. The small space of
the garden expands into the dimensions of peace. Time
pulses through my blood like a river. The language of this

is sufficient. I am here now. (Lost in Translation, p. 280)
It is of note here that in this scene of 'finding' herself in English, the

words she utters are plant names of Latin and Greek origin. The
search for the childhood language, that was a complete part of her and
not only a means of communicating, is over, and her writing on it
confirms it to the wider world, to her new world.
Hoffman describes herself as 'lost in translation', but the subtitle, A
Life in a New Language, offers the hope that it is possible to translate
oneself. Rushdie also entertains that notion:
The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the

Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the
world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that
something always gets lost in translation; I cling,
obstinately, to the notion that something can also be
gained.23
The marriage of words and objects, of the Cambridge flowers and

their names, also reveals a connection to the landscape of the new
world. In the next section I examine what part descriptions of
landscape play in the contrasting of two cultures, what they reveal of
the themes of the autobiographies, and how it connects to ideas on
identity and origin.
4. Familiar and Foreign Landscapes
Kyoko Mori's autobiographical work, The Dream of Water,

describes a trip to Japan, her country of birth, after a thirteen-year
absence, following a move to the United States at the age of nineteen.
Mori describes a difficult childhood; her mother committed suicide,
and her father treated her very badly. Mori voices many ambivalent
emotions about her home country, about her family, and about living
23 Ibid.
168 Borderlines
in another, very different, culture. As in Ondaatje's case the text is

reminiscent of a travel journal as she describes the landscape of her
childhood. Both texts are structured like travel journals, but the
difference is that Ondaatje and Mori are not searching for foreign
countries, but trying to find their past.
In the descriptions of her hometown Mori reveals all her ambivalent
feelings, her 'double vision', that she finds difficult to bring together.
The Japan Mori remembers and what she sees are two different things,
but she attempts to reconcile the two different visions, feeling at home
and being foreign:
The bright glow of neon made the city look more like a
Hollywood set than any real place. Now when I think of
singing lights and musical vendors, this whole country
reminds me of an amusement park, a big Disneyland with
computerized lights and electronic wonders. The place I
came back to seems absurd, comical, even silly.
But how can I possibly feel that way after last night, when,
lying in the dark a few miles from the house where my
mother had chosen to die, I realized it was fear that had
kept me away for so long - fear of this city, this country, of
being plunged back into my mother's unhappiness? [. . .]
I put the coffee cup in the sink and walk up the winding
stairway toward my room. To the left of the stairway, the
wall is solid with wood panels that are stained a dark
brown. To my right, from between the lighter-colored
cypress pillars, I can look down at the front entrance. The
door is open to let in the air. A light breeze is moving the
glossy leaves of the orange trees planted near the gate.
Ascending the stairway, I am suspended in midair between
these two views, between two separate pictures I cannot
bring together.24
The texts discussed in this chapter all attempt in different ways to

bring together two 'separate pictures'. One of the ways in which these
different visions come across is in descriptions of landscape. They at
times stand in for the authors' feelings about the culture they
24Kyoko Mori, The Dream of Water: A Memoir (New York: One

World/Fawcett Columbine, 1995), p. 37. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
encounter. In this passage Mori describes the city as if she were a

tourist passing through, but at the same time the city holds the key to
her decision to move away, and reminds her constantly of her
childhood. She experiences the landscape in two different ways; as the
tourist who is seeing a landscape, a view, and as an exile seeing his or
her home country. Mary Louise Pratt argues that travel writers claim
'authoritativeness for their vision' and use three strategies in their
descriptions, 'estheticization, density of meaning, and domination'.25
All these elements can be seen to be at work in these texts, but what
makes them problematic is that it is only in part that they are tourists
or foreigners, they are also describing their home countries, as they
are also natives.26
This idea of being foreign and native at the same time is an
important preoccupation in Ondaatje's text. He examines not only his
own status, but the status of other writers who have written about the
country, as well as other members of his family. The barometer
Ondaatje uses to determine whether people are natives or foreigners is
how much a part of the landscape they are. The part landscape plays is
much more than as a decorative illustration in this book, it is
inextricably linked to the people who inhabit it. He tells of his
grandfather Bampa:
25 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation

(London: Routledge, 1992), p. 217. Susan Bassnett warns us that travel
writing is never 'innocent': 'The map-maker, the translator and the travel
writer are not innocent producers of text. The works they create are part of a
process of manipulation that shapes and conditions our attitudes to other
cultures while purporting to be something else. Map-makers produce texts
that can be used in very specific ways, translators intervene in the interlingual
transfer with every word they choose, travel writers constantly position
themselves in relation to their point of origin in a culture and the context they
are describing.' Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 99.
26 Mori highlights this problem when she writes: 'I want to see the Japan I
have never seen before - the Japan that truly is a foreign country - before I
can deal with my hometown, my family, the Japan that has become foreign to
me.' The Dream of Water, p. 11.
170 Borderlines
Like some other Ondaatjes, Bampa had a weakness for

pretending to be 'English' and, in his starched collars and
grey suits, was determined in his customs. My brother, who
was only four years old then, still remembers painfully
strict meals at Rock Hill with Bampa grinding his teeth at
one end of the table - as if his carefully built ceremonies
were being evaded by a weak-willed family. It was only in
the afternoons when, dressed in sarong and vest, he went
out for walks over his property (part of a mysterious
treatment for diabetes), that he seemed to become a real
part of the landscape around him. (Running in the Family,
p. 56)
It seems to be the ultimate test for all travellers and foreigners,

whether they can become a part of the landscape, understand it, be
awed by it, but not get irritated by it. His grandfather's 'Englishness'
evaporates when he becomes a part of the landscape. His rituals go
against the natural order of things, and therefore are almost impossible
for others to keep up.
Ondaatje's text is full of ambivalence towards his own status in the
landscape: 'I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the
foreigner' (Running in the Family, p. 79). The foreigner the text
actively engages with is the figure of the Western writer. Ondaatje
examines not only his own and his family's position in Sri Lanka, but
also talks about the influence foreigners had on the country, and how
they reacted to it: 'Ceylon always did have too many foreigners . . . the
'Karapothas' as my niece calls them - the beetles with white spots who
never grew ancient here, who stopped in and admired the landscape,
disliked the 'inquisitive natives' and left' (Running in the Family, p.
80). Ondaatje quotes mostly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century writers, such as D. H. Lawrence and Leonard Woolf. These
quotations emphasise what Ondaatje shares with them, coming from
the West, travelling through a country and writing on it, but at the
same time, it reminds us of the difference, of Ondaatje's status as an
immigrant, of being part of both worlds, the 'old' and the 'new'.
This duality in his relationship to the country colours all his
descriptions of it. What drove the foreigners away is what Ondaatje
loves about the place, and gives him a sense of belonging in the
landscape:
It is delicious heat [. . .] This is the heat that drove

Englishmen crazy. D. H. Lawrence was in Ceylon for six
weeks in 1922 [. . .] his cantankerous nature rose to the
surface like sweat [. . .] Heat disgraces foreigners.
Yesterday, on the road from Kandy to Colombo we passed
New Year's festivities in every village - grease pole
climbing, bicycle races with roadside crowds heaving
buckets of water over the cyclists as they passed - everyone
joining in the ceremonies during the blazing noon. But my
kids, as we drove towards lowland heat, growing
belligerent and yelling at each other to shut up, shut up,
shut up. (Running in the Family, pp. 79-80)
If we examine his descriptions of his family, as I discussed above,

much the same duality comes to light. The stories are exaggerated,
and fantastic, but they are also a part of him, part of what made him,
and he is therefore not satisfied with the stories, the gossip, he hears.
Ondaatje is always trying to get at something deeper. He does not
want to accept the surface reality, he wants to learn the 'intimate
truths'. In the paragraph above he places himself not only as different
from the writers that came here before him, but also as different from
his own children. His dilemma is that his children are foreigners to the
country, to the landscape. It leaves him in an in-between state,
fluctuating between the old world and the new, between the past and
the present. But his children are still a part of him and manage to be
fascinated by the country, and feel that it is their place after all: 'And
my daughter turned to me on the edge of the lawn where I had my first
haircuts and said, 'If we lived here it would be perfect.' 'Yes,' I said'
(Running in the Family, p. 146). The descriptions of landscape in the
text are therefore intimately linked to his autobiographical project.
They play a role in his search for his past, his family, his country, and
they serve to remind the reader of his ambiguous status as an
immigrant.
By writing this text Ondaatje brings Sri Lanka to Canada, and he
strives to do so without falling into the same traps as other travel-
172 Borderlines
writers. At one point he describes having brought not only his

thoughts on the country and his family to Canada, but also the sounds
of the forest. In a section entitled 'The Prodigal' he describes how he
has moved the Ceylon landscape to his home in Canada and how it
changes:
One evening I kept the tape recorder beside my bed and

wakened by [the animal noises] once more out of a deep
sleep automatically pressed the machine on to record them.
Now, and here, Canadian February, I write this in the
kitchen and play that section of cassette to hear not just
peacocks but all the noises of the night behind them -
inaudible then because they were always there like breath.
It seems to me that this is part of Ondaatje's project in this text. To

bring the unheard sounds, which people take for granted in one place,
to another. In this different context they inevitably change. The
unnoticed sounds of the place are what fascinates him, he listens to
them as he writes, and so it is in that the stories he tells would only be
thought remarkable outside Sri Lanka. He is therefore always writing
as a foreigner, who is still native to the country. It is the problem as
Salman Rushdie explains that 'it's my present that is foreign, and that
the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost
time'.27
Ondaatje uses the landscape to find out truths about his family.
Contemplating his parents' marriage while visiting what was once
their home he says: 'I can leave this table, walk ten yards out of the
house, and be surrounded by versions of green [. . .] This is the colour
of landscape, this is the silence, that surrounded my parents' marriage'
(Running in the Family, p. 167). Landscape gives the added colour to
fill in the background to his parents' lives. But it also marks him as a
foreigner, a traveller, as he writes on features of the landscape people
who live in it take for granted, thus partaking in the aestheticization
and domination Pratt describes. So this text moves constantly between

knowledge of the country and of the family, and a distance, a gap,

between himself and the older generation, between himself and the
country. It is his attempts at exploring this gap which the text
describes.
When Hoffman describes coming to Canada and travelling through
it for the first time, she projects on to the landscape all her feelings of
loss and bereavement. She is crossing borders into an unknown
landscape she cannot fathom:
By the time we reach the Rockies, my parents try to pull me

out of my stupor and make me look at the spectacular
landscapes we're passing by. But I don't want to. These
peaks and ravines, these mountain streams and enormous
boulders hurt my eyes - they hurt my soul. They're too big,
too forbidding, and I can't imagine feeling that I'm part of
them, that I'm in them. I recede into sleep; I sleep through
the day and the night, and my parents can't shake me out of
it. My sister, perhaps recoiling even more deeply from all
this strangeness, is in a state of feverish illness and can
hardly raise her head. (Lost in Translation, p. 100)
Describing the country in these terms, as vast and empty, Hoffman

highlights how alienated she feels. It has a physical effect as she falls
into some kind of coma, and her sister falls ill. The contrast with the
idyllic landscape of her childhood is striking and it seems to work
from the premise that landscape which one is used to and loves, is
heimlich, the landscape that is foreign can be alien and frightening,
unheimlich. This paragraph says more about feeling uprooted, feeling
lost in a new world, than about the landscape of the Rockies.
Language and landscape are intimately connected in Hoffman's text
as for instance in the description of the Canadian flowers with the
names that belonged to them which Hoffman uses as the ending to her
autobiography, and as confirmation of her acceptance of the new
world. In another instance she describes her parents' decision to move
to Canada instead of Israel as having been influenced by descriptions
of landscape:
174 Borderlines
When my parents were hiding in a branch-covered forest

bunker during the war, my father had a book with him
called Canada Fragrant with Resin which, in his horrible
confinement, spoke to him of majestic wilderness, of
animals roaming without being pursued, of freedom. That is
partly why we are going there, rather than to Israel, where
most of our Jewish friends have gone. But to me, the word
'Canada' has ominous echoes of the 'Sahara'. (Lost in
Translation, p. 4)
The word 'Canada' can mean freedom, a promise of a new life, but
also a desert, a robbing of a childhood. The landscape can represent
this promise, this freedom, but it can also alianate one and even make
one ill. Hoffman's double vision not only signifies her awareness of
another, different culture in the New World, it also signifies her
knowledge that this move means one thing to her parents and another
to her. It also reminds us that it was she who 'made it' in this new
world, her parents had forever to struggle with poverty, and never
came to grips with the new language.28
On the one hand one can say that Hoffman's and Ondaatje's use of
landscape in their autobiographies is reminiscent of recent travel
writing, such as the works of Bruce Chatwin, in their subjective
descriptions and searching tone. On the other hand, as part of
28 Mori's feelings about leaving her country are as ambivalent as Hoffman's.

Her trip has reinforced all her ideas about her family and has made her
certain that she was right in leaving Japan. She tries to find in them a new
lease of life, a logical conclusion to what has gone before, to see her past in
terms of the inevitability of that move: 'I take a deep breath, trying to take
consolation, however small in the inevitability of my situation. My leaving is
the logical conclusion of everything that has happened to my mother and her
family: the loss of our land, the choices she made because of that loss, her
letting go of me in the end to die alone. Sitting here and waiting for my
plane, I am continuing our legacy of loss, which might in the end, turn out to
be a legacy of freedom as well. I am the daughter my mother had meant to set
free into the larger world through her losses. That is the most essential thing
about my past here. Having lost the city of my birth and childhood, I can go
anywhere in the world and not feel the same loss again. My mother wanted
me to move on, not to be afraid of uncertainty, not to be bound to old
obligations.' The Dream of Water, p. 275.
autobiographical texts, the descriptions highlight the problematic

relationship every autobiographer has to the past, the 'lost home'.
What sets these writers apart from most autobiographers is that they
have crossed borders and as I conclude this chapter I will look at some
of the ways this is engaged with in the texts.
5. Crossing Borders
Emily Apter points out that:
The current generation of exilic critics is often, as might be

expected, deeply antithetical to their Eurocentric
counterparts: non-German speaking, nonmetropolitan,
nonwhite, antipatriarchal, and, in varying degrees, hostile to
elitist literariness. And yet one could say that new-wave
postcolonial literacy bears certain distinct resemblances to
its European antecedents imbued as it often is with echoes
of melancholia, Heimlosigkeit, cultural ambivalence,
consciousnesss of linguistic loss, confusion induced by
'worlding' or global transference, amnesia of origins,
fractured subjectiviy, border trauma, the desire to belong to
'narration' as a substitute for 'nation', the experience of a
politics of linguistic and cultural usurpation.29
One of the questions autobiography often sets out to answer is 'where

do I come from?' In immigrant autobiographies this question is of
central importance. If the authors' descriptions of their homelands are
inevitably in some ways fictional, the question of origin becomes
problematic. When these authors place themselves ethnically they are
aware of the complications of doing so, that there is no single answer
to the question.
29 Emily Apter, 'Comparative Exile: Competing Margins in the History of

Comparative Literature', in Comparative Literature in the Age of
Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 1995), pp. 86-96, p. 90.
176 Borderlines
Ondaatje grapples with this question throughout the text. His

grandfather wanted to be English, his father claimed to be a Tamil. In
a section called 'Historical relations' Ondaatje explains the difficulty
in mapping his ethnic background:
Everyone was vaguely related and had Sinhalese, Tamil,

Dutch, British and Burgher blood in them going back many
generations [. . .] Emil Daniels summed up the situation for
most of them when he was asked by one of the British
governors what his nationality was - 'God alone knows,
your excellency'. (Running in the Family, p. 41)
This, of course, has added significance in a country where for the last
thirty years politics has been drawn on ethnic lines; where the Tamil
and Sinhalese have fought a bloody war. But for Ondaatje his mixed
origin is what he highlights. Not only is he a native and a foreigner at
the same time, living in the West while his past belongs to Ceylon,
but he is also Sinhalese and Tamil, Dutch and British. It is completely
alien to this text to pinpoint who belongs there in terms of ethnic
background, the only criterion is whether you accept the landscape,
the life there. This stance can be seen as naive, and to perhaps
conveniently forget the politics which have shaped the country.30 But
Ondaatje does not minimise the difficulty that can be involved in
understanding a different culture, and is fully aware of the harm done
to his country by Westerners through the centuries:
The leap from one imagination to the other can hardly be

made; no more than Desdemona could understand truly the
Moor's military exploits. We own the country we grow up
30 John A. Thieme claims that the 'work very clearly locates itself within a
postmodernist tradition, resisting unitary classification, closure and
essentialist definitions of personality and the past, and suggesting that both
individual and national identities are formed through a series of random, and
frequently bizarre, accretions.' '"Historical Relations": Modes of Discourse in
Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family', in Narrative Strategies in
Canadian Literature: Feminism and Postcolonialism, eds. Coral Ann
Howells and Lynette Hunter (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991),
pp. 40-48, p. 41.
in, or we are aliens and invaders. Othello's talent was a

decorated sleeve she was charmed by. This island was a
paradise to be sacked. Every conceivable thing was
collected and shipped back to Europe. (Running in the
Family, p. 81)
Hoffman also has a complicated relationship to her origin. As a

Polish Jew whose parents survived the war by being constantly on the
run (not least from the Polish), her ethnicity has long since been
defined for her. But it was the war that gave her her 'true origin':
My father almost never mentions the war; dignity for him is

silence, sometimes too much silence. After a while, he finds
it difficult to talk about many things, and it is not until the
events have receded into the past that he recounts a few
stories from those years - by that time so far removed that
they seem like fables again, James Bond adventures. How
will I ever pin down the reality of what happened to my
parents? I come from the war; it is my true origin. But as
with all our origins, I cannot grasp it. Perhaps we never
know where we come from; in a way, we are all created ex
nihilo. (Lost in Translation, p. 23)
This search for origin in the texts is in both instances followed by an

awareness of how complicated the answer will be. Neither writer
expects to find clues that will lead them to one simple answer. To
support the view that the war is her true origin, Hoffman points to the
way identity is shaped by events. To be Jewish in 1845 meant
something completely different than it did in 1945. Immigration and
exile can also be said to be their 'true origin'.
Loss and search for origin is not tied to these texts alone, but is an
integral part of autobiography, and these texts highlight how the
answers to these questions about origin are 'created' by the
autobiographer, no matter how much they are based in fact. Writing
an autobiography is one way of creating an origin for oneself. In his
book James Clifford claims: 'The general topic, if it can be called one,
is vast: a view of human location as constituted by displacement as
178 Borderlines
much as by stasis.'31 Hoffman seems to agree with Clifford that

crossing borders is the norm in our time:
Dislocation is the norm rather than the aberration in our

time, but even in the unlikely event that we spend an entire
lifetime in one place, the fabulous diverseness with which
we live reminds us constantly that we are no longer the
norm or the center, that there is no one geographic center
pulling the world together and glowing with the allure of
the real thing; there are, instead, scattered nodules
competing for our attention. New York, Washington,
Tehran, Tokyo, Kabul - they all make claims on our
imaginations, all remind us that in a decentered world we
are always simultaneously in the center and on the
periphery, that every competing center makes us marginal.
(Lost in Translation, pp. 274-275)
Hoffman has moved from the realisation that she has to live with
'double vision', as she will never be able to convince others that
Poland is the centre, to discover that in a decentered world there is no
one centre. The text moves from a thirteen year old girl losing her
childhood, her country, her language, to a more general discussion of
living in dislocation. This is one instance of how the text moves from
a personal, private identity - her own loss - towards an acceptance that
this loss is the general state of affairs. But it is in Hoffman's awareness
of this that she remains an immigrant.
Writing autobiography involves choosing to write about one event
and not another, choosing one style and not another, thereby
reminding us that there can always be another life, the one that is not
described in the autobiography, or the one that 'might have been'.
Living 'simultaneously in the centre and on the periphery' or with
31 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth

Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 2. Boelhower
also mentions this: 'Habitare, therefore, is an essential property of existence
and as such is also the foundational dynamic behind the montage conventions
of autobiography. But in our texts, one will recall, the topic is even more
specific in that it centres on the crisis of habitare or on the fact that it is no
longer possible to dwell in the modern world.' op. cit., p. 23.
what Hoffman calls 'double vision' also implies an awareness of the

possibility of having a different life, a fictional life. When one leaves
a country to live in another, one leaves behind a possible life. Both
Mori and Hoffman discuss this 'other' life. Mori describes a visit to
her grandparent's village:
How do I know what has changed and what remains the

same when I live so far away? How can I feel comforted by
the past when loss is the most constant thing in it? [. . .] I
am leaving behind a village where all my life, under
different circumstances, could have taken place. (The
Dream of Water, p. 186)
This makes Mori's visit to her homeland all the more poignant as she
meets friends, and watches their lives in this parallel universe.
Hoffman often mentions this problem. Her first years in Canada she
kept her 'parallel life' going by constantly imagining what she would
be doing had she stayed. Soon that becomes impossible as she realises
she does not know 'Cracow Ewa' any more. Later it is the friends she
meets on a visit to Poland that call back these thoughts. But Hoffman
realises at the end of the book that this is an impossible game:
No, one can't create a real out of a conditional history; in

the light of the simple declarative statement of actual
existence, 'would have been' or 'as if' loses its ontological
status. In a way, it doesn't count, though without it, we
would have no imagination: we would be truly prisoners of
our selves. But the shadow that this conjectural history
casts over my real one is not a shadow of regret but of
knowledge - to which we all must reconcile ourselves - that
one is given only one life, even though so many others
might have been. (Lost in Translation, p. 241)
What, for instance, would autobiography be without this possibility of

something else, some other life that could have been led?
The texts I have discussed here throw light on many preoccupations
of autobiography: for example structure, language, origin, and the life
that could have been. Hoffman and Ondaatje align themselves with
180 Borderlines
other authors, travel-writers, autobiographers, immigrants. Hoffman

writes on the experience of crossing cultures by using language as the
key to her loss of her childhood and identity and to her acceptance of
the new world, the key to her new identity. By using a tripartite
structure the text moves logically between the descriptions of her
paradise, her struggle with exile, and her life in the new world. She
does describe some kind of synthesis in the last chapter, but it is one
that comes from accepting her dislocation, rather than glossing over it,
as many 'success' stories have a tendency to do. By using the almost
generic titles to her chapters, 'Paradise', 'Exile', 'New World', she
emphasises that what she describes is an experience felt by many and
in no way unique to herself. Hoffman puts the question of writing on
the lost past thus:
To some extent, one has to rewrite the past in order to

understand it. I have to see Cracow in the dimensions it has
to my adult eye in order to perceive that my story has been
only a story, that none of its events has been so big or so
scary. It is the price of emigration, as of any radical
discontinuity, that it makes such reviews and rereadings
difficult; being cut off from one part of one's own story is
apt to veil it in the haze of nostalgia, which is an ineffectual
relationship to the past, and the haze of alienation, which is
an ineffectual relationship to the present. (Lost in
Translation, p. 242)
The autobiographical process itself is important to this text. Writing

the autobiography Hoffman creates a homeland, she defuses the fright
she experiences, or as Ondaatje puts it writes the histories to eliminate
the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and resolves her ineffectual
relation to the past and the present. She has been cured of her own
speech 'dis-ease' and gains authority and power over her new world by
writing on the old in her new language.
Ondaatje's fragmented text draws attention to his fragmented life. By
using different styles and techniques he emphasises how hard it is to
know anything about the past, and even harder to write on that elusive
knowledge. His use of metaphors, dreams and visions pierces the
smooth surface of the entertaining stories of his ancestors and alerts us
to the fact that although he is writing mainly on other people it is

ultimately a quest for his own origin and identity. His travels are
travels to his past, to the country whose landscape is an integral part
of him, that sets him apart from other travel writers, other 'foreigners'.
He attempts to reconcile two voices in this text, the foreign and the
native, the past and the present. The fragmented structure represents
the ambivalence he describes.
Both texts are attempts at bridging the gap between the past and the
present, a gap that is larger for them than for many autobiographers,
as they are a part of two different cultures. They seem to have found,
in their very different ways, a balance between the two visions that
can be said to lie somewhere between autobiography and fiction. Both
attempt to create in autobiography a homeland for themselves and in
so doing they bring their old world, the other side, to their new world.
They make their past, their culture heard in the new world. By writing
on the Poland of her childhood Hoffman is attempting to put it back in
the centre, to colour the grey, people it, and by putting her experiences
there and in Canada and the United States together in one book she
attempts some kind of fusion of the two different lives, cultures,
identities.
These autobiographical texts on journeys between cultures highlight
some of the preoccupations of autobiography. The autobiographers'
feelings of dislocation draw attention to the decentred world we live
in. The gaps the authors have to bridge may be more pronounced than
is most commonly the case, but by using fictional methods, such as
Hoffman's paradise - exile - new world structure, or Ondaatje's
fragmented experiments with different genres, they highlight the
fictional element that is always necessary in autobiography to bridge
the gaps, be it between the past and the present, or between
remembering and writing.
Chapter Five
Biography in Autobiography
It seems to me now that my family story
was all there always, everywhere, layered
away, as in the kernels of box, and that I
absorbed it somatically - took it in through
my pores with the gritty box dust.1
1. Introduction: The Question of Biography
One thread in this study that has hitherto remained unexamined is

the relationship between autobiography and biography; or more
specifically, what I would like to call the presence of biography in
autobiography. Many of the texts I have chosen for my enquiry are not
only concerned with telling the life of the narrator, they also, and
some even primarily, tell the life of the narrator's parent or parents,
and in some cases grandparents. Peter Handke, Michael Ondaatje,
Paul Auster, and Suzannah Lessard all interweave their own life story
with their parents' story. I have included these texts in my study of
autobiography as I believe this type of text to form a significant strand
in recent life-writing.
Writing on one's family constitutes a part of the more general search
for origin and identity present in autobiographical writing. In the
previous chapter I discussed Ondaatje's search for his family history in
Sri Lankan archives. Here he describes a scene where he transcribes
information from these documents:
Sit down in my room and transcribe names and dates from

the various envelopes into a notebook. When I finish there
will be that eerie moment when I wash my hands and see
very clearly the deep grey colour of old paper dust going
down the drain.2
1 Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire (London: Phoenix, 1997), pp.

1-2. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
2 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), p. 68.
184 Borderlines
In this chapter I examine in closer detail this presence of biography in

autobiography. The texts I discuss all describe the authors' search for
their backgrounds and their family history. They write about what was
'all there always, everywhere, layered away' and by writing on it they
give these layers of family history a sense of coherence and they save
the 'dust from going down the drain', and thus their family history
from disappearing. By focusing not only on the narrator's own life but
on that of the narrator's parents and/or grandparents, these texts all
pose questions about the nature of the relationship between
autobiography and biography.
Autobiography and biography are often distinguished according to
whether the narrator is the subject, but Laura Marcus explains how
restrictive such a clear division between biography and autobiography
can be:
Very recently - and the impetus has come primarily from

feminist critics - the inadequacy of this conceptual divide
has been clearly revealed and far more exciting
conjunctures occur, showing how autobiography and
biography function together. Recounting one's own life
almost inevitably entails writing the life of an other or
others; writing the life of another must surely entail the
biographer's identifications with his or her subject, whether
these are made explicit or not.3
The genres clearly function together in the texts discussed here as the
writers all devote substantial parts of their works to writing about an
other or others. When writing on another's life within the framework
of autobiography the writers inevitably have to deal with the
borderline between biographical writing and fiction, as they face the
difficulty of the ultimate 'unknowability' of others.
As I have attempted to demonstrate in earlier chapters,
autobiography, far from being a homogeneous genre, is a hybrid one.
Throughout its history it has embraced many different types of
3 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 273-274.
Biography in Autobiography 185
narrative. It includes in its folds aspects of history, fiction, confession,

conversion narrative, poetry, and the novel. It has been experimented
with greatly in the past twenty-five years or so and these experiments
are likely to continue as people's ideas about the self, about narrative,
and about history continue to change. For some time now
autobiography has been a space for experimentation and new voices,
whereas biography has largely remained outside that field of
experimentation. There are notable exceptions such as Peter Ackroyd's
biographies of Charles Dickens (1990) and William Blake (1995) and
fictional biographies such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works
of Billy the Kid (1981), Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and
A. S. Byatt's Possession (1990), but by and large biography has not
been as rich a field for experimentation as autobiography. Biography
is still in many ways a positivist genre, with many unexamined
assumptions at its core. Phyllis Frus McCord points out the difference
between the two genres:
Because the plot of an autobiography is the coming into

being of the self that is narrating, autobiographies are
frequently 'meta-autobiographical', telling the story of how
the text has come into existence. Biography, on the other
hand, is more influenced by the positivist tendencies of its
parent genre, history, with all that implies: fidelity to
documentation, realistic representation of a world posited
as objectively present to the viewer, historical third-person
narrator, and the progression of events in causal relation to
one another toward closure.4
This is a broad division and as I mentioned above there are texts

which do not fit into this scheme. Not all autobiographies are 'meta-
autobiographical' and biographers are not all as positivist as McCord
would have us believe, any more than all historians are. All the same,
this can be a helpful guideline and one that Paul John Eakin would
subscribe to when he asks 'Can Autobiography Serve Biography?' He
4 Phyllis Frus McCord, '"A specter viewed by a specter": Autobiography in

Biography', Biography 9 (1986), 219-228 (pp. 220-221).
186 Borderlines
claims that biographers and autobiographers have much to teach each

other:
For biographers who tend to take reference too much for

granted, the theory and practice of autobiography are
instructive, for they demonstrate that simplistic notions of
biographical fact need to be enlarged in order to include
modes of fiction that often constitute the experiential reality
of life history. At the same time, the example of biography
can help to remind us that autobiography, for all the
manifold fictions in which it is implicated, is nothing if not
a referential art.5
Eakin makes two points here relevant to our enquiry; firstly he

emphasises the modes of fiction that influence autobiography and
secondly he points out the importance of referentiality to both these
genres, implying that the constant movement in autobiography
between fictional and referential modes of discourse also characterises
the relationship between autobiography and biography. This is a
concern here as I examine the modes of discourse autobiographers
deploy in writing on their parents' lives.
But what happens on the border of these two sister genres? What
happens when autobiographers become biographers of their parents?
And what happens when autobiographers experiment with the modes
and conventions of biography? First let us look at William Bell's
description of biography:
Standard features of biography might include: chronology

as an organising principle; a feeling for local colour; the
purveying of fact; a reliance on documents (diaries, letters)
to illuminate the private man; scholarly method and the
panoply of scholarship; the forming of an image. In
addition, the biographer is called upon to research,

accumulate, select, order, interpret, discriminate, correct,

judge, narrate.6
What McCord, Eakin and Bell all emphasise is the role of research in
biography; the scholarship involved; the handling of documents;
interpretation; and biography's strong 'belief' in the referent. In
examining several texts that all, in one way or another, are concerned
with 'an other', I hope to show how the relationship between
autobiography and biography can illuminate the complex issue of the
role of fiction in recent life-writing. There are two elements in these
texts that require further investigation. The first is the relationship
between the narrator and subject, and how that affects the writing of
(auto)biography. There is always a certain power struggle involved
when writing on someone else as Barbara Johnson explains in
discussing Janet Malcolm's thoughts on the controversy surrounding
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes:
To be observed is to be dispossessed: our lives are precisely

what we can never own. Knowledge of them is always
already the other's. Yet Janet Malcolm goes on to compare
biography to burglary, which suggests that, whoever owns
the life, the biographer always seizes it transgressively.
What this implies is that the biographer does indeed steal,
but what is stolen is something not owned. That is perhaps
why there is so much struggle around it.7
This struggle over the question of ownership are relevant here, as the
autobiographers can be said to take control of their parents' lives by
writing on them, and thereby instigating a reversal of the conventional
power base in parent-child relationships.
6 William Bell, 'Not Altogether a Tomb: Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot',

in Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed, David Ellis (London: Pluto Press,
1993), pp. 149-173, p. 159.
7 Barbara Johnson, 'Whose Life is it, anyway?', in The Seductions of
Biography, eds. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge,
1996), pp. 119-121, p. 120.
188 Borderlines
The second element that I believe plays a large role in the interaction
between autobiography and biography is that in many instances the
autobiographer is unearthing a family secret or looking for solutions
to some problems and/or mysteries in his or her background.
Autobiography thereby comes to resemble a quest, a search for
something hidden in the family background, and I will look at how
this affects the narrative structure of the works.
The narrative structure most often applied in biography - third-
person narrative in chronological order with a very clear causal
structure - is often the very element critics of biography are most wary
of.8 This type of narrative is then seen as glossing over the
problematics of writing on someone else and hiding the ignorance of
the biographer as John Worthen mentions. Worthen explains that
because biographers have hindsight, all events in a life are explained
in narrative terms:
The fact that we want an emergent sense of the inevitable

development suggests the enormously soothing quality
which biographies have come to have in our age. Not only
do biographies suggest that things as difficult as human
lives can - for all their obvious complexity - be summed up,
known, comprehended: they reassure us that, while we are
reading, a world will be created in which there are few or
no unclear motives, muddled decisions, or (indeed) loose
ends.9
Writing on one's family background can in these terms be seen to be

an attempt to offer some cohesion to the 'muddled', 'unclear', and
'loose ends' of a parent's life and thereby create a solid base from
which to view one's own life. Giving a sense of cohesion and closure
to a parent's life can establish a sense of authority and meaning in the
writer's own life story. But how far do the writers discussed here go
8 This is mentioned in several essays in The Seductions of Biography.

9 John Worthen, 'The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer', in The Art of
Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.
227-244, p. 231.
towards writing this kind of biography of their parents? And how does
that influence the autobiographical aspects of the texts?
In the two sections that follow, the first brings together several texts
in an effort to establish a broad picture of the areas I have described.
The second deals with one text in particular, Paul Auster's The
Invention of Solitude (1982), in order to examine the questions raised
above in more detail.
2. Autobiography through Biography
The subject of biography is 'a specter viewed by a specter'

Saul Bellow10
2.1. The Relationship between Narrator and Subject
David Ellis claims in his essay on Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage

that:
it may be that the reliable method of categorizing

biographies, and bringing some semblance of order
therefore to a vague and amorphous topic, is to consider not
so much the subject as how biographers stand in relation to
it.11
This, of course, is of prime importance in the texts discussed here.

Many critics claim it makes for a more valid account of a life if the
biographer has known his subject personally (Boswell's The Life of
Samuel Johnson (1791) is usually cited as the prime example), but
what effect has it when the relationship is a very close one; i.e. a
parent-child relationship? If we are looking for a balanced, objective
account of the subject's life, such a relationship usually does not allow
10 Quoted in Mark Harris, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (Athens, GA:

University of Georgia Press, 1980), p. 182.
11 David Ellis, 'Biography and Friendship: Johnson's Life of Savage', in
Imitating Art, pp. 19-35, p. 19.
190 Borderlines
for that kind of objective approach. It has been pointed out that
biographies are in any event always to some extent also about the
biographer.12 This interaction between narrator and subject has a
special resonance when authors write about their parents. Their lives
are so intertwined, the nature of family history is such that it envelops
the subject's life, so that in autobiography the perspective inevitably
shifts back and forth from autobiography to biography. This means
that the relationship between narrator and subject is of even greater
importance in texts about the author's parents, than in other types of
biography. One could say that it is probably detrimental to objectivity
but, nonetheless, a fertile ground for experimentation with the genre
of biography. The parent-child relationship informs the texts
structurally and thematically and this affects the relationship between
autobiography and biography. Notably the texts are most often about
the relationship between the narrator and the subject and how that
affects the narrator, rather than a balanced account of their parents'
lives.
Writing on one's parent, as opposed to writing on a stranger from
another era, generally means that easy access to the material needed is
guaranteed. Also, as one knows one's parent primarily in the parental
role, the writers tend to focus solely on that role. A relationship that is
in its nature private, becomes public. The writer should know
'everything' about his or her parent, but precisely because of that the
texts often point to the impossibility of knowing 'everything' about
12 Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) are
based around exactly that premise. And as A. Robert Lee has pointed out in
his discussion of Henry James's Hawthorne: 'James, througout Hawthorne,
signals a range of further possibilities, above all the finding, the secreting
even, of his own 'biography' in that of Hawthorne. Whether done
instinctively or by design, in good faith or something rather less, he becomes
the incubus within the biographical host. Another version, to give matters an
image not quite so predatory, would be to say that Hawthorne discloses
James as "teller" in equal proportion to Hawthorne as "tale". Under these
rules of the game, and in phrasing which echoes James himself, the literary
biography of one writer by another could rarely, if ever, be other than a house
of mirrors.' 'The Mirror of Biography: Henry James's Hawthorne', in
Imitating Art, pp. 67-80, p. 79.
anyone else. More to the point, the texts expose the difficulty of
writing about someone else. Worthen affirms that:
Not only do biographers necessarily remain profoundly

ignorant of many things in the lives of the subjects, but the
narrative of a biography is in almost every case designed to
conceal the different kinds of ignorance from which we
suffer. As with all forms of knowledge we might roughly
call 'historical', biographical knowledge exists simult-
aneously with (and I believe should never be allowed to
obscure) inescapable ignorance: what I call necessary
ignorance.13
This 'necessary ignorance' comes to the fore in attempts at writing on

one's parent, be it highlighted or glossed over. For instance, in
Ondaatje's text discussed in the previous chapter, it is ultimately his
father's 'unknowability' that Ondaatje has to grapple with. His father
remains outside: he is the 'north pole'. What often becomes more
important in these cases is coming to terms with and/or situating
oneself in relation to the parent, to compare and contrast.
Italo Calvino wrote a short text on his father called 'La Strada di San
Giovanni' printed in a collection of five autobiographical essays of the
same title (published posthumously in 1990). It is a prime example of
how this kind of writing is always in equal measure about the narrator
and the subject. In the descriptions of his father it is Calvino's
relationship with him that comes to be scrutinised. His father was a
hardworking landowner who lived with and off the land. He knew
every plant name, and all there was to know about growing them.
Calvino rejects this knowledge as a child; he rejects this world, and
the text recounts the story of this rejection. When describing his
father's plants Calvino invents names for them in the text but then
goes on to say:
(And yet, and yet, if I had written some real names of plants
here it would have been a gesture of modesty and devotion
on my part, finally resorting to that humble knowledge that
13 Worthen, op. cit., p. 227.

192 Borderlines
my youth rejected in order to try my luck with other cards,

unknown and treacherous, it would have been a way of
making peace with my father, a demonstration of maturity,
and yet I didn't do it, I indulged in this joke of invented
names, this intended parody, sure sign that I am still
resisting, arguing, sure sign that that morning march to San
Giovanni is still going on, with its same discord, and that
every morning of my life is still the morning when it's my
turn to go with Father to San Giovanni.)14
This illustrates that Calvino is not only describing a relationship he

once had, with someone from his past, but an ongoing relationship,
even long after the death of the parent. The plant names become an
emblem of his father's world, symbolic of the knowledge Calvino
rejected in order to forge a different path. Still he has never
completely escaped from his father's road, even if he invents new
names for his plants. The relationship Calvino describes is at once
past and continually present, as it returns every morning to haunt him.
Calling the reader's attention to the invented plant names, Calvino
questions his own methods, alerting us to how the relationship he had
with his father impinges on the writing. This text never pretends to be
anything other than a highly subjective account of Calvino's
relationship with his father. This paragraph also marks out the belief
that the writing process itself could have changed this relationship, as
if Calvino had used the correct plant names his father taught him he
would have made peace with his father.
The works discussed here deal actively with the narrator-subject
relationship. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter when discussing the
mother-daughter relationship, there is clearly evident a power struggle
in that relationship which comes to the fore in the texts. There, the
question of ownership and authority was clearly relevant. One can
also see in Calvino's text, and in (auto)biographical texts by writers in
general, a reversal of the literary biography, as it is normally the
narrator who is the writer of the two. Literary biographies usually
14 Italo Calvino, 'The Road to San Giovanni', in The Road to San Giovanni,
trans. Tim Parks (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 3-34, pp. 12-13.
attempt to comment on the writing through a chronicle of the life. In

these texts writers comment on their own life and work through
writing on their parents, and that at times can give a sense of
legitimacy to their own writing, as they trace the origin of the 'life of
the writer' through writing on an other.
In all these texts, prominent in some, but latent in others, there is a
tension between the attempt to portray a life objectively and the
attempt to convey the personal significance of the events for the
writers. As I mentioned in the second chapter, Peter Handke voices
the concern in Wunschloses Unglck at losing the private to the
public, at individuals becoming types, of a personal narrative
becoming a generic 'Woman's Life'.15 Annie Ernaux, in her book
about her mother, voices a similar concern:
J'essaie de ne pas considrer la violence, les dbordements

de tendresse, les reproches de ma mre comme seulement
des traits personnels de caractre, mais de les situer aussi
dans son histoire et sa condition sociale. Cette faon
d'crire, qui me semble aller dans le sens de la vrit m'aide
sortir de la solitude et de l'obscurit du souvenir
individuel, par la dcouverte d'une signification plus
gnrale. Mais je sens que quelque chose en moi rsiste,
voudrait conserver de ma mre des images purement
affectives, chaleur ou larmes, sans leur donner de sens.16
15 'Ich vergleiche also den allgemeinen Formel vorrat fr die Biographie

eines Frauenlebens satzweise mit dem besonderen Leben meiner Mutter: aus
den bereinstimmungen und der Widersprchlichkeiten ergibt sich dann die
eigentliche Schreibttigkeit. Wichtig ist nur, da ich keine bloen Zitate
hinschreibe; die Stze, auch wenn sie wie zitiert aussehen, drfen in keinem
Moment vergessen lassen, da sie von jemand, zumindest fr mich,
Besonderem handeln - und nur dann, mit dem persnlichen, meinetwegen
privaten Anla ganz fest und behutsam im Mittelpunkt, kmen sie mir auch
brauchbar vor.' Wunschloses Unglck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974),
pp. 45-46.
16 Annie Ernaux, Une Femme (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1987), p. 52.
(Hereafter quoted in the text with Tanya Leslie's English translation in
footnotes.) 'When I think of my mother's violent temper, outbursts of
affection and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her
personality but to relate them to her own story and social background. This
194 Borderlines
This tension between the objective and the subjective - which can also
be called the tension between the public and the private, or the typical
and the individual - is apparent throughout both these texts. Handke
attempts to get away from historical and social explanations, whereas
Ernaux wants to see her mother's life in a larger context, but finds that
it does not represent her own emotions. Ernaux is one of many writers
to attempt to write on her parents objectively through the use of
scholarly method, be it historical research, such as Henry F. May in
Coming to Terms (1987) and Margaret Forster in Hidden Lives (1995),
or as Ronald Fraser explains in In Search of a Past (1984): 'I outline
the newly discovered aim of combining two different modes of
enquiry - oral history and psychoanalysis - to uncover the past in as
many of its layers as possible'17 or political and cultural changes as in
Tim Lott's The Scent of Dried Roses (1996). Ernaux explains her
motives:
Je voudrais saisir aussi la femme qui a exist en dehors de

moi, la femme relle, ne dans le quartier rural d'une petite
ville de Normandie et morte dans le service de griatrie
d'un hpital de la rgion parisienne. Ce que j'espre crire
de plus juste se situe sans doute la jointure du familial et
du social, du mythe et de l'histoire. Mon projet est de nature
littraire, puisqu'il s'agit de chercher une vrit sur ma mre
qui ne peut tre atteinte que par des mots. (C'est--dire que
ni les photos, ni mes souvenirs, ni les tmoignages de la
famille ne peuvent me donner cette vrit.) Mais je
souhaite rester, d'une certaine faon, au-dessous de la
littrature. (Une Femme, p. 106)18
way of writing, which seems to bring me closer to the truth, relieves me of

the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more
objective approach. And yet something deep down inside refuses to yield and
wants me to remember my mother purely in emotional terms - affection or
tears - without searching for an explanation.' A Woman's Story, trans. Tanya
Leslie (London, New York: Quartet Books, 1990), p. 41.
17 Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past. The Manor House, Amnersfield 1933-
1945 (London: Verso: 1984), p. 118. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
18 'I would also like to capture the real woman, the one who existed
independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and
who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris. The more
The use of scholarly method is an attempt at getting away from the

writers' own relationship with their subjects, to prevent their parent's
story from becoming subsumed within the private nature of the
parent-child relationship, and to see their parents objectively as people
formed by their environment and their times. It is a method the writers
alternately seek and resist. Thus the texts constantly move between the
public and the private spheres, between the subjective and the
objective. They move between the sphere of biography and the sphere
of autobiography, between historical and private knowledge.
Ira Bruce Nadel points out that biography is a third-person narrative
and explains: 'One must remember that, especially for biography,
third-person narrative, on which it relies heavily, 'best produces the
illusion of pure reference'. But, as Frank Kermode reminds us, 'it is an
illusion, the effect of a rhetorical device'.'19 This rhetorical device, the
use of the third-person narrative, is deployed in some of these texts,
for instance by Forster and May. Both Forster and May use it to tell
the story of their family before they were born and of events they had
no connection with. This includes using alternately their parents'
names in the chapters of third-person narrative and calling them
Mother and Father in the sections of first-person narrative, as May
explains: 'To reflect the shift from memory to history I have varied the
names I use for them.'20 The texts, therefore, create the illusion of
objectivity, but as they move from the third person to the first person,
they undercut that illusion.
objective aspect of my writing will probably involve a cross between family

history and sociology, reality and fiction. This book can be seen as a literary
venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that
can be conveyed only by words. (Neither photographs, not my own
memories, nor even the reminiscences of my family can bring me this truth.)
And yet, in a sense, I would like to remain a cut below literature.' p. 13.
19 Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (London:
Macmillan, 1984), p. 3. See Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 117.
20 Henry F. May, Coming to Terms: A Study in Memory and History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. x. (Hereafter quoted in
the text.)
196 Borderlines
But attempting objectivity does not only serve to give a fair account
of a parent's life, it can also have more personal ramifications. Ernaux
can here again enlighten us:
Ceci n'est pas une biographie, ni un roman naturellement,

peut-tre quelque chose entre la littrature, la sociologie et
l'histoire. Il fallait que ma mre, ne dans un milieu
domin, dont elle a voulu sortir, devienne histoire, pour que
je me sente moins seule et factice dans le monde dominant
des mots et des ides o, selon son dsir, je suis passe.
(Une Femme, p. 106)21
Explaining a parent's behaviour in terms of history and circumstances

can lessen the impact of this behaviour. One can see in all these texts
attempts at objectivity, but at the same time anxiety over the effect of
that objectivity; a fear that the individual will be lost, and the private
taken over by the public. There is a tension between the fear of losing
the sense of individuality and uniqueness and the longing to explain
their parent's character and behaviour in terms of social and historical
circumstances. This involves moving between two modes of discourse
and two types of knowledge - between history and memory.
Some autobiographical texts have the explicit purpose of examining
the parent-child relationship, in the tradition of Edmund Gosse's
Father and Son (1907). J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself (1968)
is one such text. Ackerley has to re-examine his relationship with his
father following the revelation after his father's death that for most of
his adult life he had led a double existence.22 This work sets out
21 'Naturally, this isn't a biography, neither is it a novel, maybe a cross

between literature, sociology and history. It was only when my mother - born
in an oppressed world from which she wanted to escape - became history that
I started to feel less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and
ideas, the world where she had wanted me to live.' p. 91.
22 'Yet our relationship was never to be what I think he would have wished,
close and confidential, the kind of relationship I fancy he might have had
with my brother. After his death, when I knew more about him and believed
he may have guessed about me, I regretted this. Whether I could have
achieved a nearer understanding with him must remain a question; I was only
sorry, when it was too late, not to have put it more boldly to the test. It is the
explicitly to examine this father-son relationship. Descriptions of

people and events are all there to serve that purpose. In the process
Ackerley comes to examine not only his relationship with his father,
but also comes to consider others who influenced that relationship.
One of those is Ackerley's older brother who was killed in the First
World War. Ackerley presents him as the favourite son, as the one
who would have been capable of having a close relationship with his
father, and even at one point claims that he would not have written
this book (My Father and Myself, p. 52). This father-son relationship
is the one that Ackerley continually refers back to. It becomes the
ideal father-son relationship (it is largely imagined as his brother died
so young), but it is what Ackerley measures his own failure by. Thus
the relationships these texts describe are never clear-cut or obvious.
They are complicated by other family members, by unexpected
events, untold family stories or family secrets.
Forster, May, Ackerley, Calvino and Ernaux all attempt, with
different methods, to examine the parent-child relationship. Thus the
narrator-subject relationship is actively explored in these texts and this
sets them apart from more conventional biographical writing where
this relationship often remains unexamined. It is in this exploration
that autobiographical and biographical writing come together. And
one can see, for instance in Calvino and Ackerley, the belief that the
writing process itself will influence the way in which they view this
relationship.
2.2. Auto/biography as Quest
The autobiographical process is often seen as a process of discovery.

Some writers claim to be attempting to get to know their parents
through writing on them. The moment they most strongly feel the
need to start writing is when a parent dies. They embark on a quest to
purpose of the rest of this memoir to explore as briefly as possible, the

reasons for our failure.' J. R. Ackerley, My Father and Myself (London:
Bodley Head, 1968), pp. 75-76. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
198 Borderlines
find their parent, to 'touch them into words'. One can see in these
instances a strong belief in the power of the writing process; they
claim to have no choice, they have to write about their father or
mother. Ernaux describes this need:
Je vais continuer d'crire sur ma mre. Elle est la seule

femme qui ait vraiment compt pour moi et elle tait
dmente depuis deux ans. Peut-tre ferais-je mieux
d'attendre que sa maladie et sa mort soient fondues dans le
cours pass de ma vie, comme le sont d'autres vnements,
la mort de mon pre et la sparation d'avec mon mari, afin
d'avoir la distance qui facilite l'analyse des souvenirs. Mais
je ne suis pas capable en ce moment de faire autre chose.
(Une Femme, p. 22)23
This need is voiced by many authors, for instance by Peter Handke,

Tim Lott, Paul Auster and Margaret Forster. In writing on their
parents they become the voice of the parent, they have the last word,
so to speak, raising their own monument to them. The subject is silent,
except when in rare cases the texts include excerpts from letters or
diaries.
Texts written after the death of a parent are often attempts at coming
to terms with the death: the illness, as in Susan Wicks's Driving My
Father (1995), and watching a parent die or descriptions of suicide,
as in Tim Lott's and Peter Handke's case.24 They describe the different
23 'I shall continue to write about my mother. She is the only woman who
really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile
dementia for two years. Perhaps I should wait until her illness and death have
merged into the past, like other events in my life - my father's death and the
break-up with my husband - so that I feel the detachment which makes it
easier to analyse one's memories. But right now I am incapable of doing
anything else.' p. 12.
24 Richard K. Sanderson and Rena Sanderson have this to say about writing
on someone who committed suicide: 'Unlike, say, death by cancer, suicide
allows for especially significant linkings of the death to the life. Not simply
an act of self-destruction, suicide is also an act of communication, an attempt
at self-fashioning and self-dramatization, and an expression of a need for
control. Suicide, in short, has something in common with autobiography.'
emotions they go through while writing about the death and by doing
so discover something new about the parent, as in Paul Auster's The
Invention of Solitude or in Ackerley's work. Here we come to what is
at the centre of many of the texts: the family secret. Much evident in
for instance Susan Cheever's Home Before Dark (1985).
The revelation of a family secret changes completely the way the
authors have thought and felt about their families, it is something that
casts a new light on the whole relationship. This is often at the centre
of the texts; it provides the narrative thread, informs the structure and
the writers' whole approach to their theme. May attempts in two ways
to write about his parents: 'I will present them first as I remember
them and then as I have learned to understand them by studying their
papers, their origins, and their vanished worlds' (Coming to Terms, p.
18). There are two kinds of knowledge here; firstly the private
memories and secondly the light that documents and research can
shed on these memories. May also explains why he needs to write on
them. It is not exactly a need to unearth some deep family secret, but a
quest for understanding: 'This combination of memories - the strong
but somewhat frightening father of my childhood and the sad, failing
old man of my adolescence - was so painful that it was a long time
before I could set about trying to understand my father' (Coming to
Terms, p. 25).
Writing one's family history does not always involve a family secret,
but still the quest goes on to learn the truth behind family stories.
Margaret Forster writes on four short episodes from her grandmother's
life:
Four fragments, full of facts but full of hearsay too, the very
stuff of family history. Over and over again we get told
stories by our parents and grandparents, and sometimes, if
these stories are treated seriously and checked, that is all
they turn out to be - stories, unsubstantiated and often
downright contradicted by the actual evidence in records.
But sometimes beneath the stories lurks the history of more
'Suicide and Literary Biography: The Case of Ernest Hemingway', Biography

20 (1997) 405-436, (p. 408).
200 Borderlines
than an ordinary person. Sometimes their story is the story

of thousands.25
Forster never finds out her grandmother's secrets; she cannot find any
documents that would explain what happened to her grandmother
between the ages of two and twenty-three. The process itself is still a
process of discovery, albeit an attempt at a more general
understanding of the lives of working-class women in her
grandmother's time, than a detailed account of her grandmother's life.
As (auto)biographies often focus on the narrator's search for identity
through writing on his or her family, the family secret revealed
becomes pivotal to that search. The texts can therefore be seen as
attempts at finding some clue or even explanation to what they see as
the key to either their parent's character or their relationship with their
parent. This attempt at putting the family stories into perspective, at
learning the truth behind the family lore, can involve checking family
records and documents in order to look for coherence and meaning.
Through documents - public and private - interviews, and writing,
memories and public and private events, the writers try to make sense
of their own life and identity through the telling of their parent's life.
Hence, these texts inevitably raise questions about both biography and
autobiography.
Biography is a branch of history and hence it often involves a fair
amount of research; a search through letters, diaries, and official
records. A good example of the research process and then creating
something out of that research can be found in Alan Berliner's short
film My Father (1996). Berliner, an American film-maker, made an
hour long film on his father, Oscar Berliner. The film is built around
an interview with his father, intercut with interviews with other
members of his family; old photographs; 8mm films his father shot;
shots of his father on his own in New York; shots of places the film-
maker visited to look for material; titles either with the name of the
person speaking or stating a theme; and a black and white film of a
25 Margaret Forster, Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir (London: Penguin,

1996), p. 13.
boxing match. Oscar Berliner is a reluctant participant in his son's

project and Alan uses the boxing match to illustrate their dialogue. He
says to his father at the beginning of the film that he wants to know
everything about him and his family. This is what drives the film.
Berliner uses a great deal of secondary material, such as photographs,
films, interviews, public records, and he travels to his grandfather's
home country. The viewer follows him through all this. Berliner puts
his own mark on the family story through the editing process. It is not
only a film about his father, it is a film about the process of making a
film about his father. This process can often be seen in the texts,
although not all are as transparent as Berliner's film. Many include
photographs, some letters and occasional journal or diary entries and
some give a historical background to their parent's past.
A popular form of novel writing includes using a family to provide
the cast of characters, and the family can serve as a useful tool to
examine cultural changes over a period of time. Often at the core is a
family secret that provides a metaphor for comments on society at
large.26 This convenient vehicle for narrative has not been overlooked
by autobiographers. But the autobiographical nature of these works
means that the story of the revelations of a family secret often
becomes a type of quest, a search for a meaning, or sense of identity,
through the author's family background, and the ultimate aim is to
explain, or interpret, his or her own life. The question then of who is
the subject - the child or the parent - becomes more complex.
All biographies need a narrative structure as Nadel explains: 'In
transforming the unselective moments of a life into a pattern, the
biographer establishes both an explanation and a theme for his
subject.'27 Family secrets are usually kept as the high-point of the
narrative structure. Ackerley is unusually honest about his methods:
The apparently haphazard chronology of this memoir may

need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number
of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as
26 See for instance Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
and Thomas Mann, Die Buddenbrooks.
27 Nadel, op. cit., p. 9.
202 Borderlines
history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of

the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they
need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford
them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and
have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the
method of ploughing to and fro over my father's life and my
own, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the
plough turned. Looking at it with as much detachment as I
can command, I think I have not seriously confused the
narrative. (My Father and Myself, p. 9)
One can infer from this that when the narrative is focused on the
revelation of a secret, chronology is often left behind. The chronology
that is used is the chronology that will emulate the impact of the
narrator's discovery, rather then the chronology of events in the
subject's life. With this the author attempts to let the reader in on the
shock they themselves felt on the discovery, but at the same time they
leave any pure factual account behind. The authors explain two kinds
of relationship with their family, before and after the shock. It comes
therefore as a surprise in Suzannah Lessard's The Architect of Desire
that she lets the reader in on the family tragedy right away:
That Stanford [Lessard's great-grandfather] was a famous

Beaux-Arts architect, notorious for being murdered in
scandalous circumstances, was part of the environment too.
He was, however, rarely mentioned on the Place. He was
latent. The silence about him was something dark right
there in the light. (The Architect of Desire, p. 2)
But it is not until near the end of the book that she reveals the truth
about her family, as I discussed in a previous chapter. The truth about
Lessard's abusive father, that she and her sisters had never discussed
and thought it was partly their own imagination, is kept mostly hidden
throughout. With that revelation Lessard changes completely the
perspective the reader has had on her family. And, however minutely,
re-creates her own sense of shock. Ackerley explains what a
revelation like this can mean:
The discovery of my father's duplicity gave me, I suppose,

something of a jolt, not severe to a mind as self-centred as
mine, but a jolt which gradually intrigued and then engaged
my thought more and more as the years passed. It was the
kind of shock that people must receive when some old
friend, who has just spent with them an apparently normal
evening, goes home and puts his head in the gas-oven. The
shock, after the shock of death, is the shock to
complacency, to self-confidence: the old friend was a
stranger after all, and where lay the fault in
communication? My relationship with my father was in
ruins; I had known nothing about him at all. (My Father
and Myself, p. 163)
A revelation of this kind calls for a reappraisal of the family

relationship and many attempt that in the writing. The writing is an
attempt as in Lessard's text to bring out in the open what has remained
hidden, to notice the family history that is all around you, to
investigate the 'complacency' with which we regard our family
history. The 'hidden lives' of the past are what all of these texts are
concerned with. Revealing secrets gives family stories a completely
different meaning. Both Lessard and Ackerley expose the myth of
their family. But that can by the same token lead to myth-making as
Nadel explains:
However, the ambiguity of 'myth' is a handicap: on the one

hand it suggests the essence of a person and on the other,
the legend that person has created. For biography this is
especially problematic because it finds itself with a dual
activity, one assigned, the other assumed. The first is the
desire to correct or revise the myth; the second is its own
unconscious creation of new myths.28
What is interesting in this process of destroying one myth and creating

another, is that the writers seem almost reluctant to use their own
words. Ackerley quotes from his father's letters to reveal his double
life, Lessard the words of her sisters. Family secrets, like Stanford
28 Ibid., p. 176.
204 Borderlines
White's murder, can echo the writer's own secrets, such as Lessard's
memories about her father that she kept secret, or Ackerley's
homosexuality he kept secret from his family or the suicide of Lott's
mother and Lott's own problems with depression. Revelation of one
secret seems to lead automatically to the revelation of the other.
Lessard makes clear throughout that she believes the two events to be
inextricably linked, one could not exist without the other, and both
coloured her childhood.
Ackerley's world is full of secrets. He learns that his father's other
children did not know that he was their father, and Ackerley never
reveals his father's secret to his mother. At one point it seems he
almost avoids learning more, as his decision to throw away his father's
desk without looking in it highlights. Ackerley does not know why he
agreed to have it thrown away:
high-minded state of desiring his posthumous wishes may

have included a sense of scruple in invading further secrets
of a life he had not thought fit to share with me. But
perhaps the most likely formula for my feelings would be: I
was then quite incurious about my father's history. (My
Father and Myself, p. 159)
Years later, when helping his mother move house, Ackerley has
become curious. He goes through his mother's belongings attempting
to find out something new and all he finds is stacks and stacks of old
newspapers and other wastepaper. This scene illustrates the fact that
not every family hides a secret, not every document is of equal
importance.
James Ellroy's book on his mother, My Dark Places: An L. A. Crime
Memoir (1996), touches upon many of these themes. Ellroy's mother
was murdered when Ellroy was ten years old, and her murderer was
never found. Ellroy became obsessed with detective stories and real
life murder cases. Every woman murdered was potentially his mother.
Many years later, after having become a succesful crime writer, Ellroy
decides it is time he used his knowledge and his writing to find his
mother's murderer. He had written about her before, most notably in
Clandestine (1980), but it only 'superficially addressed Jean Ellroy. It
was all about her son at age 32'.29 My Dark Places is divided into four
sections: 'The Redhead', 'The Boy in the Picture', 'Stoner', and 'Geneva
Hilliker'. In the first section Ellroy describes the events surrounding
his mother's murder and throughout that section talks about himself in
the third person: 'The victim's son was pudgy, and tall for 10 years
old. He was nervous - but did not appear in any way distraught' (My
Dark Places, p. 12). His mother in this section is a police case,
nothing more and described as either 'the Redhead' or: 'The Jean
Ellroy job - Sheriff's Homicide File #Z-483-362' (My Dark Places, p.
17). The text charts the slow process of Ellroy's attempt to find his
mother's murderer combined with a gradual realisation that what he
ought to be doing is getting to know his mother.
In some places the text becomes a dialogue with his mother and at
the start of each section there are paragraphs in italics where Ellroy
addresses her and makes her promises: 'I won't give up your secrets so
cheaply. I want to learn where you buried your love' (My Dark
Places, p. 80). And at the start of the next section: 'I am determined to
find you. I know I can't do it alone' (My Dark Places, p. 156). The text
moves between pronouns - as in May and Forster - as Ellroy realises
that his need to find his mother's murderer masks the real need to get
to know his mother.
The genre that has made Ellroy succesful and from which he draws
in this text is not chosen arbitrarily. It is represented as the genre that
has punctuated his life, described his fears (after his mother's death)
and his dreams (of saving those murdered women): 'It was a literary
formula preordained directly for me. It let me remember and forget in
equal measure. I ate those books up wholesale and was blessedly
unaware of the internal dynamic that made them so seductive' (My
Dark Places, p. 95). His approach is nothing if not thorough; he prints
in full transcripts of witness statements, charts in minute detail the
original investigation and his own investigation. He is assisted by a
Los Angeles detective, Stoner, who becomes a father figure, a symbol
for his own feelings for detective work, and Ellroy even tells of some
29 James Ellroy, My Dark Places: An L. A. Crime Memoir (London: Arrow

Books, 1997), p. 207. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
206 Borderlines
of Stoner's other cases. The investigation inevitably involves an

investigation of Ellroy's own past and of prime importance here is his
attitude towards his mother and her death. In the very last section,
where he, significantly, uses his mother's maiden name in the title, he
finally visits her relatives and finds out about her past. But trying to
find her is not easy: 'I didn't want to place her in fictional settings or
wrap my revelations up and call them her life summarized. I didn't
want to write her off as complex and ambiguous. I didn't want to
shortchange her' (My Dark Places, p. 321). He realises he has not tried
to get to know her: 'I had to know her life the way I knew her death'
(My Dark Places, p. 323). The crime story in the end proves
inefficient - he never finds her murderer - and the (auto)biographical
element gains importance over the detective story.
Ellroy's use of documents, as when he quotes his mother's police file
at length, denotes an attempt to get to know his mother objectively,
through facts alone. But this in the end does not provide him with the
answers he craves. He realises that viewing his mother only as a
murder victim reduces her to one event in her life and denies her a
past, a story. The transcripts of the investigation and the witness
statements give the text an aura of a detailed factual account, so the
reader feels as if he or she is participating in Ellroy's search. But as
Richard Holmes points out: 'The biographer has always had to
construct or orchestrate a factual pattern out of materials that already
have a fictional or reinvented element.'30 So the use of diaries, letters,
and other documentation in these texts involves an historical approach
to biography, but putting one's trust in these documents and believing
they can provide the 'truth', in the end proves that they tell only part of
the story.
Not all the writers mentioned here are satisfied with their search.
Ronald Fraser attempted through oral history and psychoanalysis to
understand his past. The last paragraph of Fraser's text describes an
interview with his psychoanalyst and it reveals his disappointment
with the results:
30 Richard Holmes, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary

Biography, pp. 15-25, p. 17.
But still, in the silence, there's a secret doubt. Finally, I

voice it: 'I've always thought that history served one
purpose at least. By discovering the major factors of
change one could learn from them. The same ought to be
true of an individual's history.'
'Yes . . . You want to be the subject of your history instead
of the object you felt yourself to be,' he replies warmly.
'The subject, yes - but also the object. It's the synthesis of
the two, isn't it?'
'The author of your childhood then, the historian of your
past.'
'That's what I intend - to write about it from inside and out.'
'I'm sure . . . ' He pauses. 'Well, we'll have to leave it there
for today.'
I find my glasses and swing my legs off the couch. 'I'll see
you next Monday.' I turn to look at him for a moment, and
his face is impassive. (In Search of a Past, p. 187)
But why this fascination with a secret, a hidden life, a family

mystery? Perhaps it is because as Holmes points out: 'Biography finds
it difficult to deal imaginatively with the mundane.'31 But one could
also claim that biography is always a type of quest, an extreme
example being A. J. A. Symons' The Quest for Corvo (1934). To be
an historian of one's past then always includes some type of quest.
Whether it be as in Lessard and Ackerley the revelation of a family
secret, or in other instances a quest for understanding of a parent's
character or behaviour.32 Writing a parent's biography is a not only a
31 Ibid., p. 19.
32 Virginia Woolf explains: 'I am much nearer [my father's] age now than
my own then. But do I therefore "understand" him better than I did? Or have
I only queered the angle of that immensely important relationship, so that I
shall fail to describe it, either from his point of view or my own? I see him
now from round the corner; not directly in front of me. Further, just as I
rubbed out a good deal of the force of my mother's memory by writing about
her in To the Lighthouse, so I rubbed out much of his memory there too. Yet
he too obsessed me for years. Until I wrote it out, I would find my lips
moving; I would be arguing with him; raging against him; saying to myself
all that I never said to him.' 'Sketch of the Past', in Moments of Being:
208 Borderlines
quest in the usual biographical sense, it is also an autobiographical

quest that marks the structure and theme of the texts. It becomes the
narrative drive, and thus biography becomes a part of autobiography.
The writers gain authority over the public representation of their
parent, and at times they break down one myth only to create another.
In the second half of this chapter I look closely at one text to see how
these elements, the relationship between subject and narrator, and the
revelation of a family secret, can tell us something about the genre of
biography when it is lodged in autobiography.
3. Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude: An

Autobiographical Attempt at Biography
There is so much in life, especially though

in the family, that a man doesn't want to
understand with just his understanding
alone, rather he decides in his
subconscious to maintain unchanged what
has been unclear or to know it only in
part.33
3.1. A Father and a Son
Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude is made up of two parts:

'Portrait of an Invisible Man' and the 'Book of Memory' which I
discussed in the first chapter. They are both autobiographical texts,
though they cannot in a conventional sense be called 'autobiography'.
The central theme of both parts is father-son relationships. In the first
part, Auster deals with his relationship with his father, and the second
deals with his relationship with his own son. 'Portrait of an Invisible
Man' is an account of his father's life, of his marriage, of Auster's
Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (London:

Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 119.
33 Gubergur Bergsson, Eins og steinn sem hafi fgar (Reykjavk:
Forlagi, 1998), p. 394 (my translation).
relationship with him, of his life in his later years, and of his death. On
one level then, this is a biography of Samuel Auster, but Auster's
approach is not that of an objective biographer but that of a writer
trying to understand his relationship with his father. The text is also
interspersed with Auster's own story, his childhood, marriage, and
career.
Like many other writers Auster is prompted to write about his father
after his father's death. Writing about his father is represented as
something he had to do, as an inevitable reaction to his death:
Even before we packed our bags and set out on the three
hour drive to New Jersey, I knew that I would have to write
about my father. I had no plan, had no precise idea of what
this meant. I cannot even remember making a decision
about it. It was simply there, a certainty, an obligation that
began to impose itself on me the moment I was given the
news. I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly,
his entire life will vanish along with him.34
Here again we have the emphasis on the importance of the writing

process. The 'obligation' to stem the fear of death, the fear of a life
story disappearing, is represented as the only response the writer can
have. This is further highlighted in the penultimate paragraph of
'Portrait of an Invisible Man' with a quotation from Kierkegaard:
'... here it holds good that only he who works gets the
bread, only he who was in anguish finds repose, only he
who descends into the underworld rescues the beloved,
only he who draws the knife gets Isaac. . . He who will not
work must take note of what is written about the maidens
of Israel, for he gives birth to the wind, but he who is
willing to work gives birth to his own father'. (The
The act of writing is a debt that Auster owes to his father. Only work
will save his father, if not actually from death itself, at least from
34 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),
p. 6. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
210 Borderlines
disappearing without a trace. Auster is very concerned with avoiding

this disappearance and as he explains: 'What disturbed me was
something else, something unrelated to death or my response to it: the
realization that my father had left no traces' (The Invention of Solitude,
p. 6). Auster, as a writer, feels obliged to reverse this, which brings us
again to the reversal of the literary biography. A life of writing leaves
traces and as a writer Auster has to give these traces to his father. To
give birth to his own father becomes a constant motif in this text and
points to the authority involved in writing on someone else. As I
mentioned earlier there is often a tension in such texts between
attempts at being objective and preserving personal memories. Auster
is not concerned with objectivity. What matters to him is not only to
prevent his father from disappearing, but to examine in every detail
their relationship. But he also explains, as he writes on himself in third
person in 'The Book of Memory': 'It is a nostalgia for his own life that
he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father'
(The Invention of Solitude, p. 81). He therefore attempts not only to
give birth to his father, but also tries to relive his own childhood, how
it was being a son to his father.
The father-son relationship is constantly reversed in this text, as
Auster plays with the idea of that relationship. In this text Auster is
both son and father, not only in the biological sense, but as he has the
notion of becoming his father's father, and in the 'Book of Memory'
when he tells his son the story of Pinocchio, who became his father's
father, Auster becomes his son's son.35 He writes an autobiography as
a son and as a father, and his story centres on these two roles in his
life. The biography of his father is also centred on that role, his father
as a father and as a son of a woman who murdered his father. The
father-son relationship is not investigated here with reference to
historical or cultural situations, but is much more concerned with its
philosophical and literary aspects. Auster's text is interspersed with
quotations and all are either from philosophy or literature. This gives
35 This idea of reversing the father-son relationship has preoccupied Auster

in some of his other works, for instance in his script for the film Smoke. See
Smoke and Blue in the Face: Two Films (London: Faber and Faber, 1995).
the text an unmistakably literary feel; this is a writer situating himself

and his relationship with this father in the world of literature.
Auster tells in the 'Book of Memory' how he saves his son from near
death by recognising that his illness was serious and getting him to
hospital in time. In this text such acts are represented as the ultimate
responsibility of a father. Pinocchio saves his father and thereby gives
birth to him. Auster's son identifies with Pinocchio and is empowered
by the thought of being able to save his own father. Auster could not
save his father from death, and therefore the act of writing becomes
even more urgent for him.
The life of Samuel Auster in this text is looked at constantly from
the perspective of his role as a son and a father. Every story Auster
tells of him touches in one way or another on that subject. This is a
complete reversal of what happens in texts where the autobiographers
attempt to see their parents not as parents but as individuals, as May
and Ernaux both attempt. It denies the possibility of giving an
objective account of one's father.
The text is made up of short anecdotes, lists of things Auster
remembers about his father, and short paragraphs on his habits. The
lists of things that remind Auster of his father are largely unexplained,
as for instance he mentions 'tropical fish' (The Invention of Solitude, p.
29) without explaining what they have to do with his father. The
reader is thereby denied access to many of the private memories of his
father. The biographical part in this text is therefore always
autobiographical. The reader nevertheless learns a great deal about
Samuel Auster's life, but the emphasis is always on the father-son
relationship. Discarding the usual requisites of biography, such as
objectivity and chronology, Auster is free to experiment with the
genre. Putting himself so firmly in his father's story, as he identifies
with him as a father himself, he manages a synthesis between
biography and autobiography.
May, Forster, Lott, and Lessard, all divide their texts - to a different
extent - into chapters on other family members - calling them in some
cases by their names - and chapters on their own childhood, and all
make a firm distinction between what they remember themselves and
what they learned from other sources; between 'objective' accounts
212 Borderlines
and personal memoirs. In May's and Forster's works autobiography

and biography sit uncomfortably together. There is a sense in which
fusing the two genres has not worked, mainly, I believe, because they
try too hard to follow conventional biographical practices in writing
on their family without acknowledging the inevitable influence of
autobiographical practices in works of this type. Auster fuses the two
together, his father's name is rarely mentioned, he is 'my father'
throughout the text, their relationship, in the biological and emotional
sense, is always in the foreground.
'Portrait of an Invisible Man' is a meticulously constructed text. It
starts with Auster's need to write after the death of his father and ends
on this note on his son:
Past two in the morning. An overflowing ashtray, an empty

coffee cup, and the cold of early spring. An image of
Daniel now as he lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end
with this.
To wonder what he will make of these pages when he is old
enough to read them.
And an image of his sweet and ferocious little body, as he
lies upstairs in his crib asleep. To end with this. (The
Auster highlights in this text that he is always both father and son. He
even becomes his grandfather's son when he nurses him through his
illness. The death of his father leads him to examine his role as a
father and a son. But his father's role as a son was a comlicated by
extraordinary events, which leads us on to the family secret, and how
that is treated in this text.
3.2. The Myth of the Family Secret
As I mentioned above, the narrative drive in these texts is the quest

for the truth behind the family lore or the reasons for a parent's
behaviour or character. Lessard explains this curiosity family stories
can ignite:
The Chanler stories were light and, above all, funny, yet
there was an urgency in the way the crazy things the
Chanlers had done were recounted. It was as if somewhere
inside these stories - which were for the most part little
more than snatches, vignettes, and splinters - there was the
flash of a grail-like truth. Something about our family that
we needed to know. (The Architect of Desire, p. 170)
There is not necessarily anything hidden in these stories, but they

carry with them some sense of the past, a possibility of deeper
meaning, a feeling of being of great importance. At the centre of
Auster's text on his father is a catastrophe - a family secret - that was
kept very well hidden. There were not even the usual half-told family
stories that gave any clue to the existence of a hidden event. It is only
through a series of coincidences that Auster discovers the secret. The
quotation on the title page from Heraclitus becomes all the more
appropriate: 'In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected,
for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it.'
After his father's death, Auster feels that he did not know his father
at all, and therefore embarks on a quest to try to understand him, with
the firm belief at the start that writing will help him to do so. The text
is centred around two moments; his decision to write after his father's
death, and an earlier moment (in his life, later in the text) when he
discovers how his grandfather died. The revelation that his
grandmother murdered his grandfather when Samuel Auster was two
years old is in exactly the middle of the text. Auster, like Lessard,
Ackerley, and Ellroy, lets other people tell most of the story, in his
case he quotes from letters and newspaper articles. He explains his
difficulty in writing about this event:
Now the moment has come to write about them, I am

surprised to find myself doing everything I can to put it off
[. . .] It is not that I am afraid of the truth. I am not even
afraid to say it. My grandmother murdered my grandfather
[. . .] The facts themselves do not disturb me any more than
might be expected. The difficult thing is to see them in
print - unburied, so to speak, from the realm of secrets and
214 Borderlines
turned into a public event. (The Invention of Solitude, p.

35)
Auster claims early on in the text that he does not know his father,
does not understand him, and that is one of the reasons why he has
decided to write about him. So, when he reveals this terrible secret,
the reader is set to believe that this explains his father's character. That
here is the key to the whole text. But Auster has previously warned us
that nothing can be taken at face value, least of all his father:
If there is nothing, then, but silence, is it not presumptuous

of me to speak? And yet: if there had been anything more
than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first
place? [. . .]
He was so implacably neutral on the surface, his behaviour
was so flatly predictable, that everything he did came as a
surprise. One could not believe there was such a man - who
lacked feeling, who wanted so little of others. And if there
was not such a man, that means there was another man, a
man hidden inside the man who was not there, and the trick
of it, then, is to find him. On the condition that he is there
to be found.
To recognize, right from the start, that the essence of this
project is failure. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 20)
I quote this at length as it points to many important elements in this

text. Auster's central premise is that his father is unknowable, but at
the same time he will try to know him by writing about him. His
father was a man who said nothing of his own thoughts and emotions,
and when Auster reveals the secret of his past, the reader is therefore
ready to accept that this is the solution to the problem. But Auster has
warned us that 'the essence of this project is failure'. The revelation
then works on at least two levels. Firstly, it is undeniably of great
importance, it has undoubtedly formed his father's character, and
therefore it is certainly one key to Auster's project. But at the same
time it is completely outside Auster's experience of his father,
completely outside their relationship, and can in itself not provide the
solution to the question why his father never told him about it, or
explain his character fully. Not because it was not a seminal event in
his life, but because one can never put someone else fully into words.
As Virginia Woolf points out, this problem is not a new one:
On the one hand there is truth; on the other there is

personality. And if we think of truth as something of
granite-like solidity and of personality as something of
rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of
biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we
shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need
not wonder if biographers have for the most part failed to
solve it.36
The event, therefore, in part takes on the purpose of the false clue, that
Auster used later in his New York Trilogy (1987-1988), and the first of
many strange coincidences which occupy so many of his later
works.37 Auster refuses to create what Nadel terms a biographical
myth from this:
In its process of demythologizing and creating myth,

biography parallels the central archetype of death and
rebirth. Reading lives both destroys and creates our image
of the subject and is one of the great attractions to
biography: even though the historical figure dies, the
biography continues his presence - in itself a mythic,
phoenix-like activity re-creating and perpetuating the self.
Biography, in its gratification of wish-fulfillment, embodies
a dream; in its stress on moral example, it becomes an
allegory. In this way biography sustains its duality in
mythic as well as generic ways.38
The murder does not become an allegory. Auster invades his father's
solitude, but invents his own as a writer. He emphasises the difference
between them by claiming his father's solitude was destructive and
alienating, but his own is productive; it is part of work, it is writing.
36 Virginia Woolf, 'The New Biography', in Collected Essays, vol. 4, ed.

Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 229-235, p. 229.
37 See especially Auster's The Music of Chance (1990).
216 Borderlines
The expectation is when embarking on a quest that if one looks, one

will find something, but as in the quotation from Heraclitus, not only
is it difficult to find, but puzzling when you find it. Auster in this
work points out the problematics of this quest, he uses it as a narrative
drive, but at the same time avoids a simple solution.
Peter Handke describes in his book on his mother that it is about
moments that are unsayable, not a 'coherent story with a foreseeable,
reassuring ending'.39 Auster echoes this feeling when he claims 'the
story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language' (The
Invention of Solitude, p. 32). But even though Auster does not believe
that he will ever find one answer to his questions, it does not
invalidate the quest itself. This thought carries over to the writing, he
believes that the writing process itself will bring knowledge, but it is
not necessarily accurate either; Auster has after all painted a portrait
of an 'invisible man'.
After his death Auster tries to make his father's past become a part of
his life. He takes objects from his father's house to remember him by,
but finds the exercise to be futile:
But objects, it seems, are no more than objects. I am used to

them now, I have begun to think of them as my own. I read
time by his watch, I wear his sweaters, I drive around in his
car. But all this is no more than an illusion of intimacy. I
have already appropriated these things. My father has
vanished from them, has become invisible again. And
sooner or later they will break down, fall apart, and have to
be thrown away. I doubt that it will even seem to matter.
(The Invention of Solitude, p. 68)
The true intimacy is in the writing, as there Auster intertwines their

lives in such a way that each becomes an indispensable part of the
other, but because of the autobiographical nature of the text it does so
without explaining his or his father's life fully. For as Michael
Sheringham has pointed out: 'The subject of autobiography is a
hybrid, a fusion of past and present, self and other, document and
39 'keine runde Geschichte mit einem zu erwartenden, so oder so trstlichen

Ende.' Wunschloses Unglck, p. 45.
desire, referential and textual, nonc and nonciation - not a product

but a process.'40
Despite Auster's constant hesitations, doubts, his struggle with the
story, the short paragraphs, etc., the text has a strong narrative drive;
Auster makes the reader curious. He tries various methods to capture
his father's character, to paint his portrait in words. He describes
memories of isolated events, lists of characteristics, includes a
description of his father's work, of how he maintained his house, his
attitudes to money,41 to his daughter, to his grandson, his life before
marriage, his family, brothers, mother and of course the centre of it
all, his grandfather's death. But the individual memories and facts
refuse to construct a whole picture, their significance is doubtful, at
times contradictory, and Auster refuses to provide the links, to go in
for cliched 'pseudo'-psychoanalytic explanations. By saying his
father was invisible, he is implying that there was more to his father
than he can know, he refuses to believe that this is all there was.
4. Conclusion
In including biography in their autobiography, authors have to

grapple with the standard features of biography, such as chronology as
an organising principle, historical research, and the creation of an
image. Not all of the authors go to the same lengths in attempting an
objective biographical account of their own parents. Woolf's
distinction between biography and fiction is that:
One is made with the help of friends, of facts; the other is

created without any restrictions save those that the artist,
for reasons that seem good to him, chooses to obey. That is
a distinction; and there is a good reason to think that in the
40 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires:

41 Auster was later to write in more detail of this aspect of his father's
character in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (New York: Faber
and Faber, 1997).
218 Borderlines
past biographers have found it not only a distinction but a

very cruel distinction.42
As I discussed in the introduction, biography has lagged behind the

more experimental autobiography, but these authors show that when
included in autobiography interesting possibilities arise. It can allow
authors to question elements that are taken for granted in biography.
The special relationship between the narrator and subject, and the
tension between the two, can be a fertile starting-point for getting
away from Woolf's 'cruel distinction'. For the problem biography often
has is an inability to question the possibility of writing about someone
else. McCord explains some of the reasons why biography is still not
taking on board changes that other genres have seen:
It is probably not going too far to say that biography is the

genre least affected by contemporary critical theories. We
can swallow the deconstruction of our favourite realistic
novels, and we don't mind the departure of the author from
the text, but when it comes to 'real people', we find it
difficult to accept a theory that would substitute textuality
for clearly articulated presences whom we perceive as
objectively real.43
Autobiographers have long since been conscious of the difficulty of

their task, and the same kind of consciousness is what Nadel believes
can help biography: 'As biographers become more self-conscious
about their means of presentation, authorial presence will become
more problematic.'44 Looking at these (auto)biographies as quests, and
discussing the way they deal with family secrets, shows the narrative
conventions usually deployed in biography, and some of the texts also
point to the limits of these conventions. Despite Ellroy's unstinting
accuracy and research, it does not deliver the knowledge he hoped for.
And May's and Forster's intertwining of the historical and the
42 Virginia Woolf, 'The Art of Biography', in Collected Essays, vol. 4, pp.

221-228, p. 222.
43 McCord, op. cit., pp. 219-20.
autobiographical shows the difficulty in maintaining any kind of

objectivity in this type of life writing.
Texts that leave the struggle for objectivity behind, or show an
awareness of the problematics of such objectivity, can move
biography to a different level, and create a fertile fusion of two modes
of writing, based on both memory and history. Texts that cross
borders, such as Auster's and Ondaatje's works, not only deal with
both historical knowledge and memory, but also inevitably have to
come to terms with the role of fiction always involved when writing
on 'an other'.
Chapter Six
Photographs in Autobiography
to have such a memorial of every being
dear to me in the world. It is not merely
the likeness which is precious in such
cases - but the association and the sense
of nearness involved in the thing . . . the
fact of the very shadow of the person
lying fixed forever!1
1. Introduction: Portraits in Autobiographies
Photographs have become an inseparable part of biographies and

autobiographies in the twentieth century. Almost every autobiography
now contains some photographs, and even if they do not, many
autobiographers discuss photographs from their past. Most often the
images show the 'life in pictures' in chronological order. These
photographs usually show the subject as a young child, parents and
grandparents, and often look like excerpts from the family album.
Others have attempted a more creative approach in their use of
images, for instance Suzannah Lessard, who includes a few telling
images strategically placed in her autobiography and lists a
photographic editor in her acknowledgements. But usually the
photographs do not seem to serve a specific thematic purpose, they are
'simply' illustrations, and have the effect of reminding the reader that
these people existed and this is what they looked like. Some
autobiographers, however, show an awareness of the complex power
of photography and so the photographs (sometimes only mentioned
and not included) are of a more thematic and structural importance
and can serve a distinct purpose in the author's rendering of his or her
life.2
1 Elizabeth Barrett in a letter from 1843 quoted in Helmut Gernsheim,

Creative Photography (New York: Bonanza, 1972), p. 28.
2 Celia Lury points out: 'While there is a long-standing and growing
literature on the subject-effects of narrative, the significance of the image for
understandings of the self in modern Euro-American societies still remains
222 Borderlines
In Doris Lessing's first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin

(1995), one finds a good example of the most common manner in
which photographs are used in autobiographies. There are three inserts
of photographs, corresponding roughly to the text's chronology. The
first insert shows pictures of Lessing's parents, of her as a baby, and of
the house where she was born. The second insert shows pictures of her
and her family on various occasions and the last photograph in that
insert is of her as a young woman with her two children. The last
picture in the third insert is of her without her children and the caption
reads: 'In 1949, just before I left for London' which is exactly where
we leave her at the end of the first volume.3 The photographs are not
mentioned in the text so they do not register with the reader as being
of any specific significance. But the last photograph gains new
connotations as the reader discovers that Lessing left her children
behind when she moved to London, therefore placing the photograph
of herself where she does clearly denotes the significance of that event
in her life. This is a good example of how the relationship between
text and photographs defines the images' effect and meaning. When
the complex relationship between text and photographs, in a work
such as this, is not actively engaged with, the photographs' thematic
importance is diminished, and where they have only very simple
captions - a name and a date at the most - there is assumed a direct
correlation between the text and the images; they appear as
illustrations to the text. The photographs are there as definitive
documents to prove the referentiality of the text. It seems as if their
role is to point out that these are pictures of the world outside the text,
to which the text constantly refers. The choice is simple, or 'natural'.
They are the pictures of a life, containing all the important elements;
somewhat under-developed, tending to become subsumed within more

general discussions of postmodern culture. And this despite the recent
proliferation of technologies of visulisation and the widely accepted claim
that visibility is an imperative of contemporary life.' Prosthetic Culture:
Photography, Memory, Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 2.
3 Doris Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography: To
1949, (London: HarperCollins, 1994), photograph insert, no page number.
Photographs in Autobiography 223
parents, the childhood home, the summer holidays, the husband,

children, etc., all in chronological order.
It might be too simplistic to say that autobiographies that display this
'conventional' method of using photographs denote a 'conventional'
text. But perhaps it would be more pertinent to say that they do not
question the 'pure' referentiality of the photograph, and do not doubt
its inherent meaning. For if Linda Haverty Rugg is right in claiming
that photographs and autobiographies pose similar questions about
referentiality, perhaps one could see the way in which photographs are
used in autobiographies as symptomatic of the text's self-examination
and its 'meta-autobiographical' quality.4 Rugg also explains the reason
for the proliferation of photographs in autobiographies:
the autobiographer must come to terms with the existence of

photography in creating a textual self-image, for the mere
presence of photography challenged traditional forms of
autobiographical narrative by calling into question essential
assumptions about the nature of referentiality, time, history,
and selfhood.5
This, Rugg explains, has been a factor in autobiography since the

inception of photography, and with photography's ready availability, it
plays an important part in contemporary life-writing. These questions
are at the core of our discussion here.
Photography's seeming transparency is what makes it a continually
challenging medium. Our perception of photography's power of
representation has to be constantly re-examined and re-evaluated.
John Tagg is one of those who maintains that photographs are without
any intrinsic meaning:
The indexical nature of the photograph - the causative link

between the pre-photographic referent and the sign - is
highly complex, irreversible, and can guarantee nothing at
4 See especially the introduction in Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing

Ourselves: Photography and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997).
5 Ibid., p. 231.
224 Borderlines
the level of meaning. What makes the link is a

discriminatory technical, cultural and historical process in
which particular optical and chemical devices are set to
work to organise experience and desire to produce a new
reality - the paper image which, through yet further
processes, may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.6
This might be a little too dogmatic for our purposes as, even though in
some ways accurate, it does not account for people's perception of and
their relation to photographs. What I want to look at here is how,
through the process of autobiographical writing, photographs gain
meaning and significance and how photographs can in return alter our
understanding of the text.
The significance of photographs in autobiographies manifests itself
in a number of ways. For instance it is directly linked to how the
subject sees him/herself in photographs, identifies with an earlier 'self'
or self-image and inscribes it in the text. There are not as many
photographs in Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory
(1967) as in Lessing's Under My Skin, but they are carefully chosen
with long and sometimes witty captions. There is a picture of the
house he was born in, of his grandparents, parents, brothers and
sisters, of him as a young man, his wife, his son, himself at his desk
and of the butterflies he discovered. The photograph of him at his desk
has an illuminating caption where Nabokov describes in minute detail
every single object in the photograph. He gives the date, the place,
what novel he was writing at the time, the family photographs one can
see in the picture and even describes things we cannot see, such as
how the moths used to fly in through the open windows. Nabokov
writes in the caption:
My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the

act of writing a novel in our hotel room [. . .] Seldom does a
casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely. Many years
ago, in St. Petersburg, I remember being amused by the
Collected Poems of a tram conductor, and especially by his
6 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and

Histories (London: Macmillan Education, 1988), p. 3.
picture, in uniform, sturdily booted, with a pair of new

rubbers on the floor beside him and his father's war medals
on the photographer's console near which the author stood to
attention. Wise conductor, farseeing photographer!7
The photograph, Nabokov claims, captures his life completely, but the
reader would not necessarily see it that way if there were no caption.
The image itself is in the classic genre of 'a writer at his desk'.8 So not
only does this example raise questions about the relationship between
image and text, but also about how we read images; how details and
objects can serve as clues, memory aids (and memorials) to the past,
and Nabokov voices the widespread opinion that the 'unposed' picture
must somehow be 'truer' than the posed one. The snapshot that is
reproduced in the book does not tell the reader very much; it is the
caption that gives it meaning. Nabokov does not claim that this
photograph captures his 'inner life' or some truth about his self. It
captures the things he did at that time; his working life, his habits, his
writing and his butterflies. All this becomes important years later in
America when it serves as a spark for memories of his life in Europe.
As Rugg points out: 'one might say that the inclusion of photographs
7 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

(London: Penguin Books, 1969), photograph insert, no page number.
8 Rugg mentions the implications for autobiography when they include
portraits of the author and thereby disclaims Paul de Man's contrasting of the
role of the referent in photography and autobiography: 'It is precisely the
insertion of photographs into autobiographical narratives that reveals why
autobiographers would refuse de Man's suggestion: such images connect the
image to the text and at the same time to the writer's body, employing the
photograph to remind the reader of the hand holding the pen. In many cases,
the author specifically chooses an image of the writing self to represent the
body as writing subject. These gestures insist on the referential power of texts
through drawing an association (rather than de Man's contrast) between
autobiography and photography. We can dismiss the presence of the living
subject in neither the photograph nor the autobiography, but we must at the
same time attend to the deconstructive potential of both image and name.' op.
cit., p. 36. See Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement', in The
Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp.
67-81.
226 Borderlines
envisions a revitalization of the corpse of the author, a remembering

of the autobiographical self'.9 This photograph, therefore, is a starting
point for Nabokov's memories and gains an almost symbolic
resonance as every detail in it tells us something about his life.
Nabokov 'reads' the photograph in such a way as to make the reader
'believe' in its complete referentiality; it refers to every facet of his
life. It is this correspondance between the image and the life we
inevitably look for in photographs in autobiographies.
Photographs in autobiographies and biographies sometimes serve as
clues to the past, to what things were 'really' like, and can often
encapsulate how we view photographs. As David Ellis points out: 'If
our means of access to the past were satisfactory, there would be
every reason for turning our back on photographs. It is because they
are not that photographic portraits remain invaluable.'10 This could
well explain the significant role photographs play in contemporary
autobiography, for despite Tagg's observation and the technological
possibilities of digital photography, we still view photographs as
important documents, not only for the individual's past, but for the
historical past as well.
The snapshot of Nabokov writing at his desk is reminiscent of a type
of biographical portraiture where the subject is surrounded by
significant items from his or her life: a coat of arms, books, a desk and
writing material or some other paraphernalia that denote the subject's
occupation or status. Richard Brilliant in his book suggests four
categories of biographical portraiture:
[Biographical portraiture] can preserve the fragmentary

nature of human existence in a number of ways. First, this
can be achieved through a series of portraits, made at
different times and representing different stages in a
person's life [. . .] In these cases, the portrait repertoire
comes to constitute a figural record of the subject over the
9 Rugg, op. cit., p. 21.

10 David Ellis, 'Images of D. H. Lawrence: On the Use of Photographs in
Biography', in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London:
Reaktion Books, 1992), pp. 152-172, p. 171.
years, providing, in the ensemble, a sense of the whole

being as a changing constant. Or [. . .] only a significant
aspect of a life may be chosen for representation in
portraits, because of its special saliency or great historical
importance in that life [. . .] Other prominent figures [. . .]
seem to change very little with the passing years. At last,
some portraits of public figures, such as Lenin, eventually,
through repetition, become clichs or are so from their very
inception; these latter images never seem to change at all,
but through replication become in effect iconic. These four
kinds of biographical portraits simulate very different
patterns of reception, since the first group explicitly
acknowledges the fact of change in human life, the second
ignores it, the third varily accommodates it, while the
fourth denies it altogether.11
The difference between Brilliant's last three categories may not be

very great, but it is still a usable model. We can think of Doris
Lessing's photographs as following the first model in the breadth of
photographs printed and Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1986) following
the second, where she focuses mainly on one image of herself and
spins her stories around it, even though that photograph does not exist.
But the difference between photographs in autobiographies and
biographical portraiture has to be emphasised as it is the narrative in
the autobiographies that is telling a life and can either work with or
ignore the photographs that accompany it. Stendhal's diagrams and
plans in his Vie de Henry Brulard serve much the same purpose. They
are an integral part of the text, and are not only there as explanations
for the reader, but as memory aids and sources of writing for the
author.
Besides illustrated autobiographies and biographical portraiture there
is a third category that sometimes combines the two: photographers
who represent their life photographically, as for instance Annette
Kuhn, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence. As Brilliant says of self-
portraits: 'With greater or lesser degrees of success, self-portraiture
11 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), pp. 132-

134.
228 Borderlines
always makes a concentrated autobiographical statement, the

manifesto of an artist's introspection.'12
A book that includes both autobiographical writing and writing on
photography and on portraits that capture a life is Roland Barthes's La
Chambre claire (1980). The book's most salient feature is the way it
combines critical discussion on photography with highly personal
accounts of the writer's relationship with photographs. Barthes claims
that his desire to write on photography 'refltaient bien une sorte
d'inconfort que j'avais toujours connue: d'tre un sujet ballott entre
deux langages, l'un expressif, l'autre critique'.13 This tension is what
drives Barthes's text and is therefore of importance to our discussion.
Photography seems to pose problems for any critical discussion. The
question whether it is 'Art', and doubts about its transparency,
influence, and meaning seem to permeate all discussion on
photography. As Richard Bolton explains:
For every claim about the transparency and obviousness of

the photograph, there can be found an opposing claim
emphasizing the difficult language introduced by the
photograph, a language based in the liberties of framing,
montage, juxtaposition, and surreality.14
And since photographs are so much part of everyday reality, so

readily available and often highly personal, it is often difficult to
distance oneself from them (perhaps that is also unnecessary). They
often straddle the elusive gap between the public and the private and
12 Ibid., p. 158.
13 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris:
ditions de l'toile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980), p. 20. (Hereafter quoted in
the text with Richard Howard's translation in footnotes.) It 'corresponded to a
discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn
between two languages, one expressive, the other critical', Camera Lucida,
trans. Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 8.
14 Richard Bolton, 'Introduction', in The Contest of Meaning: Critical
Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989), pp. ix-xviii, p. xi.
are therefore important to any discussion of these matters in

autobiography.
In what follows I propose to examine what autobiographers say
about the photographs in their texts; in other words, what use they
make of them in the text. Do they use them to illustrate a point, or to
aid their memory? What significance are they given, what impact do
they have, and what meaning? I should stress that the artistic merit of
photographs in autobiographies plays less of a role here than the
context in which the photographs are placed and what the authors say
about them in the text. The nature of the photographs is presumably
such that the authors themselves do not base their choice on their
artistic merit and so the question seems irrelevant, which in itself
poses significant questions about what we expect from photographs in
autobiographies. I focus mainly on four authors: I examine Barthes's
relationship to photographs in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes
(1975) and La Chambre claire, the thematic importance of the
photographs of Georges Perec's parents in W ou le souvenir d'enfance
(1975), Paul Auster's use of photographs as clues to family history and
his father's character in The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Michael
Ondaatje's important find in Running in the Family (1982) and how it
relates to his use of photographs and documents in The Collected
Works of Billy the Kid (1981).
2. Roland Barthes and the Meaning of Photographs
Photography is the medium which most obviously displays our

presence in the world. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, Janet
Frame describes having her photograph taken when she gets out of the
mental hospital:
The photograph was urgent, a kind of reinstating of myself

as a person, a proof that I did exist. In my ignorance of
book publication I had supposed that all books carried
photographs of their authors and I remembered my feeling,
when copies of The Lagoon were brought to me in hospital,
that I had no claim to the book, that there was not even a
230 Borderlines
photograph to help stake a claim. This, combined with my

erasure in hospital, seemed to set me too readily among the
dead who are no longer photographed; my years between
twenty and nearing thirty having passed unrecorded as if I
had never been.15
Photographs are often used as proof of our existence, validating our

claim officially in passports and identity cards that we are who we say
we are. For Frame not having been photographed for so long means
that she has no proof she existed. She was in the land of the dead, did
not have a claim to her own book and by going to have her
photograph taken she reinstates her presence in the world. It is
interesting to note, however, that she does not include this or any
other photograph in her autobiography. But what kind of presence is
the photograph? What does it tell us about the past? What is the
fascination we have with photographs and how is it possible to link
images and text?
Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is one of the most intriguing
examples of the use of photographs in autobiography. Not that his
choice of photographs is surprising, rather it is the relationship
between the photographs and the collection of fragments that make up
the text that pose important questions about our perception of
photographs and the use of photographs in autobiography, especially
with reference to the image and the truth-value of photographs.16 The
photographs in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes are the usual fare:
of Barthes as a child, as a young man, his parents, grandparents, the
house he lived in, etc. What is interesting is that they are arranged at
the start of the book, the first forty pages or so, and bear no direct
15 Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table (London: Picador, 1993), pp. 129-30.

16 As Barthes claimed later in an interview: 'Ce que j'aime au fond, c'est le
rapport de l'image et de l'criture, qui est un rapport trs difficile, mais par l
mme qui donne de vritables joies cratrices, comme autrefois les potes
aimaient travailler des problmes difficiles de versification.' 'Sur la
photographie', from interviews conducted by Angelo Schwarz (late 1977) and
Guy Mandery (Dec. 1979), Le Photographe February (1980) in Le Grain de
la voix: Entretiens 1962-1980 (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1981), pp. 328-334,
p. 334.
relation to the text itself. That is to say the events depicted are not
described as such in the text. The photographs are printed in
chronological order interspersed with captions and short texts. The
text itself is a collection of fragments arranged alphabetically with
headings either noting an idea or phrase. One could say that the
fragments are almost like captions, not to images but to ideas or
phrases, and reciprocally photographs are sometimes thought of as
fragments of a life. What is of interest is the conventionality - even
banality - of the photographs compared to the experimental nature of
the text.17 The presence of the images at times contradicts but at other
times confirms ideas stated in the text.
Barthes is fascinated by his relationship to photographic images of
himself, and he introduces them as an indulgence:
Voici, pour commencer, quelques images: elles sont la part

du plaisir que l'auteur s'offre lui-mme en terminant son
livre. Ce plaisir est de fascination (et par l mme assez
goste). Je n'ai retenu que les images qui me sidrent, sans
17 Despite the experimental nature of the text Sean Burke claims that it still
maintains its status as autobiography: 'It is, therefore, in its pronominal
economy that Roland Barthes is most markedly set off from conventional
forms of autobiography [. . .] However, in subverting this autobiographical
etiquette Roland Barthes does not break with the deep structures of the
autobiographical rcit.' The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1992), pp. 54-55. But Johnnie Gratton emphasises Barthes's
anti-autobiographical stance: 'The pre-critical subject is the confessional,
dissident, innocent "I" whose claim to recognition within or alongside the
more austere regime of critical discourse introduces what I earlier deemed it
appropriate to call an "autobiographical" factor. But by this stage I can no
longer put off reckoning with Barthes's own patent boycott of the term
'autobiographical', most strongly signalled in his preference for the terms of
fiction, which inevitably suggest an anti-autobiographical slant.' 'Roland
Barthes par Roland Barthes: Autobiography and the Notion of Expression',
Romance Studies 8 (1986) 57-65, (p. 62). And Paul John Eakin points out
that 'even at [Barthes'] most "anti-autobiographical", his most agressively
fictional, he does not shake free from the pull of reference.' Fictions in
Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton
232 Borderlines
que je sache pourquoi (cette ignorance est le propre de la

fascination, et ce que je dirai de chaque image ne sera
jamais qu'imaginaire).18
It is interesting to note that he claims not to know why the images at

the start of the book fascinate him as it is exactly this fascination and
the difficulty of writing about photographs that concerns him in his
later work La Chambre claire. Words such as 'plaisir' and 'fascination'
give a picture of his relationship with images that is in some ways
different from some of his claims in the text itself. On the first page of
the text proper he claims:
Il supporte mal toute image de lui-mme, souffre d'tre

nomm. Il considre que la perfection d'un rapport humain
tient cette vacance de l'image: abolir entre soi, de l'un
l'autre, les adjectifs; un rapport qui s'adjective est du ct de
l'image, du ct de la domination, de la mort. (Roland
Barthes, p. 47)19
Are the photographs then not related to the 'image'? Do they not
'adjectivize'? There is no mention of pleasure or fascination with the
'image'. Domination and death are phrases sometimes heard in
connection with the photograph, as I discuss below, but Barthes does
not seem to link the two in the photograph section.
18 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1980), p. 5.

(Hereafter quoted in the text with Richard Howard's translation in footnotes.)
'To begin with, some images: they are the author's treat to himself, for
finishing his book. His pleasure is a matter of fascination (and thereby quite
selfish). I have kept only the images which enthrall me, without my knowing
why (such ignorance is the very nature of fascination, and what I shall say
about each image will never be anything but . . . imaginary).' Roland Barthes
by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (London: Papermac, 1995), p. 3.
19 'He is troubled by any image of himself, suffers when he is named. He
finds the perfection of a human relationship in this vacancy of the image: to
abolish - in oneself, between oneself and others - adjectives; a relationship
wich adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of
death.' p. 43.
Barthes's difficulty is how to write on oneself without naming,

adjectivising oneself. Paul Smith points out in his discussion of
Roland Barthes:
[Barthes's text] speaks to the possibility of a mobile and

continual process of knowledge and its inscription. This
process is accretive or ever expanding and, thus, open to the
inscription of a changing history of the subject/individual.
It is that continual process that Barthes's work registers, all
the while recognizing not only the pull of interpellation in
any of the objects of his study, but also the perhaps even
more conservative pull - the temptation and the lure - of the
imaginary.20
The photographs and fragments indirectly complement each other.

The continual process Smith talks of is represented pictorially in that
the photographs are of Barthes from various ages, as in Brilliant's
discussion above they provide 'a sense of the whole being as a
changing constant'. The fragmentary nature of the text, although an
attempt to get away from the 'conservative pull of the imaginary', still
does not satisfy that need as Barthes explains under the title 'Le
fragment comme illusion':
J'ai l'illusion de croire qu'en brisant mon discours, je cesse

de discourir imaginairement sur moi-mme, j'attnue le
risque de transcendance; mais comme le fragment [. . .] est
finalement un genre rhtorique et que la rhtorique est cette
couche-l du langage qui s'offre le mieux l'interprtation,
en croyant me disperser, je ne fais que regagner sagement le
lit de l'imaginaire. (Roland Barthes, p. 99)21
20 Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1988) p. 104.
21 'I have the illusion to suppose that by breaking up my discourse I cease to
discourse in terms of the imaginary about myself, attenuating the risk of
transcendence; but since the fragment [. . . ] is finally a rhetorical genre and
since rhetoric is that layer of language which best presents itself to
interpretation, by supposing I disperse myself I merely return, quite docilely,
to the bed of the imaginary.' p. 95.
234 Borderlines
Trying to escape narrative, Barthes only finds another type of rhetoric

in the fragment. He has an ambivalent relationship to the imaginary,
reverberating between fascination and a feeling of oppression but
finds it in the end inescapable as he writes under the heading
'L'imaginaire': 'l'imaginaire vient pas de loup, patinant en douceur
sur un pass simple, un pronom, un souvenir, bref tout ce qui peut se
rassembler sous la devise mme du Miroir et de son Image: Moi, je'
(Roland Barthes, p. 109).22
Barthes's problem with the image-system is closely linked to the
autobiographical act. But this problem is not as apparent in the
photographic section, although the split subject has its place there.
This is what he says of his fascination with the childhood
photographs:
Embrassant tout le champ parental, l'imagerie agit comme

un mdium et me met en rapport avec le 'a' de mon corps;
elle suscite en moi une sorte de rve obtus, dont les units
sont des dents, des cheveux, un nez, une maigreur, des
jambes longs bas, qui ne m'appartiennent pas, sans
pourtant appartenir personne d'autre qu' moi: me voici
ds lors en tat d'inquitante familiarit: je vois la fissure
du sujet (cela mme dont il ne peut rien dire). Il s'ensuit que
la photographie de jeunesse est la fois trs indiscrte
(c'est mon corps du dessous qui s'y donne lire) et trs
discrte (ce n'est pas de 'moi' qu'elle parle). (Roland
Barthes, pp. 5-6)23
22 'very frequently, the image-system creeps in stealthily, gently skating

over a verb tense, a pronoun, a memory, in short, everything that can be
gathered together under the very device of the Mirror and of its Image: Me,
myself, I.' p. 105.
23 'Embracing the entire parental field, such imagery acts as a medium and
puts me in relation with my body's id; it provokes in me a kind of obtuse
dream, whose units are teeth, hair, a nose, skinniness, long legs in knee-
length socks which don't belong to me, though to no one else: here I am
henceforth in a state of disturbing familiarity: I see the fissure in the subject
(the very thing about which he can say nothing). It follows that the childhood
photograph is both highly indiscreet (it is my body from underneath which is
presented) and quite discreet (the photograph is not of 'me').' p. 3.
The photograph establishes our presence in the world, but it is always

a past presence that is established, and the present remains elusive. It
is a photograph of Barthes, yet it is not of the Barthes who looks at the
photograph and writes on it.
This problem of looking at and discussing photographs of oneself is
highlighted in the paragraph opposite a page with two portraits of him,
one taken in 1942, the other in 1970:
Mais je n'ai jamais ressembl cela! - Comment le savez-

vous? Qu'est-ce que ce 'vous' auquel vous ressembleriez ou
ne ressembleriez pas? O le prendre? A quel talon
morphologique ou expressif? O est votre corps de vrit?
Vous tes le seul ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu'en
image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abtis par le
regard qu'ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l'objectif (il
m'intresserait seulement de voir mes yeux quand ils te
regardent): mme et surtout pour votre corps, vous tes
condamn l'imaginaire. (Roland Barthes, p. 40)24
In Barthes's attempt to escape the image, he illustrates his text with a

plethora of images. Therefore one finds there is not only one image, or
only one presence, but several different ones, although they are all of
him. It seems that both in writing on oneself and looking at a
photograph of oneself one is 'condamn l'imaginaire' and returns to
'le lit de l'imaginaire'. This points to the notion that in this text the
image-repertoire is both viewed as a necessary evil and as a safe-
haven. As Johnnie Gratton claims in his essay on Roland Barthes:
the field of the subject is everywhere staked out by Barthes

as the domain of the imaginaire [. . .] as to denote broadly
24 '"But I never looked like that!" - How do you know? What is the "you"
you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which
morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You
are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you ever see
your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest ypon the mirror or the
lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and
especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its
images.' p. 40.
236 Borderlines
that which is mistaken to be real, but without ever losing its

technical sting. The imaginary subject [. . .] wants to
express himself because he wants to be. In other words, he
would rather not know that his sense of wholeness is itself
propped up by an image or image-system which being
always an instance of the other can never be his own.25
Thereby the photographs, which at first look like any photographs in

any autobiography, gain a different meaning. They are images of
Barthes but are not Barthes. They are from his past, but, as Barthes
constantly reminds us, images are unreliable, although still
fascinating.
This question of what 'you might or might not look like' brings us
back to the question of the meaning of photographs. Graham Clarke
points out that:
the portrait's meaning exists within a world of significance

which has, in turn, already framed and fixed the individual.
The photograph thus reflects the terms by which the culture
itself confers status and meaning on the subject, while the
subject as image hovers problematically between exterior
and interior identities.26
This is what one continually comes back to in the text; the subject
hovering between exterior and interior just as family photographs
printed in a book always pose questions about the relationship
between the public and the private. Barthes comes back to his problem
with images in La Chambre claire: 'ah, si au moins la Photographie
pouvait me donner un corps neutre, anatomique, un corps qui ne
signifie rien! Hlas, je suis condamn par la Photographie, qui croit
bien faire, avoir toujours une mine: mon corps ne trouve jamais son
degr zro' (La Chambre claire, p. 27).27 What Clarke calls the
25 Gratton, op. cit., p. 62.

26 Graham Clarke, 'Introduction', in The Portrait in Photography, pp. 1-5,
p. 3.
27 'if only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body
which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well-meaning) Photography
hovering 'between exterior and interior identities' corresponds in some

ways to Barthes's claim that his body 'ne trouve jamais son degr
zro'. Even if we have established that photographs are never 'us', that
there is no essential 'I' that can be represented in photographs, we still
continue to search for that essence.
The photographs in Roland Barthes can be seen both as a playful
addition to the problematic text of Roland Barthes but they are also a
sign of things to come in La Chambre claire where the 'conservative
pull of the imaginary' becomes even more apparent. The transition
from the ideas in Roland Barthes to his writing on photography in La
Chambre claire is well described by Paul John Eakin: 'When the
austere tenets of poststructuralist theory about the subject came into
conflict with the urgent demands of private experience, Barthes turned
for solace [. . .] to photography, which he regarded as the supremely
referential art.'28 This brings Barthes to a discussion of a more private
and perhaps more conventional nature than the fragments in Roland
Barthes. He claims in Roland Barthes that 'Il se sent solidaire de tout
crit dont le principe est que le sujet n'est qu'un effet de langage'
(Roland Barthes, p. 82),29 but that feeling seems to diminish in La
Chambre claire.
always to have an expression: my body never finds its zero degree, no one
can give it to me.' p. 12.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 4. Jacques Derrida has also
pointed out: 'Benjamin saw in the analytic enlargement of the fragment or
minute signifier a point of intersection between the era of psychoanalysis and
the era of technical reproduction, as seen in cinematography, photography,
etc. (Moving through, extending beyond, and exploiting the resources of
phenomenological as well as structural analysis, Benjamin's essay and
Barthes' last book could very well be the two most significant texts on the so-
called question of the Referent in the technological age).' 'The Deaths of
Roland Barthes', trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas in Philosophy
and Non-Philosophy, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1988), pp.
259-296, p. 264.
29 'He wants to side with any writing whose principle is that the subject is
merely an effect of language. ' p. 79.
238 Borderlines
In La Chambre claire Roland Barthes discusses his ideas on

photography which culminate in the search for a photograph of his
mother that he feels compelled to perform after her death. The search
for likeness is not bound to photographs of ourselves but also of
others, as Barthes tries to find the photograph of his mother, a
photograph of her in which he finds her. He goes through many
pictures before finding the right one:
Au gr de ces photos, parfois je reconnaissais une rgion de

son visage, tel rapport du nez et du front, le mouvement de
ses bras, de ses mains. Je ne la reconnaissais jamais que par
morceaux, c'est--dire que je manquais son tre, et que,
donc, je la manquais toute. Ce n'tait pas elle, et pourtant ce
n'tait personne d'autre. Je l'aurais reconnue parmi des
milliers d'autres femmes, et pourtant je ne la 'retrouvais'
pas. Je la reconnaissais diffrentiellement, non
essentiellement. La photographie m'obligeait ainsi un
travail douloureux; tendu vers l'essence de son identit, je
me dbattais au milieu d'images partiallement vraies, et
donc totalement fausses. (La Chambre claire, p. 103)30
This 'travail douloureux' performed by Barthes, 'tendu vers l'essence

de son identit', is parallel to the autobiographical act, the attempt at
self-expression, the explanation of an identity.
The death of his mother and Barthes's search for her in photographs
brings him to the conclusion that it is possible to find someone's 'true
self' in photographs. What is remarkable here is that he finds this in a
photograph of his mother as a child: 'devant la Photo du Jardin
d'Hiver, je m'abandonnais l'Image, l'Imaginaire. Je pouvais donc
30 'According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her

face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her
hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I
missed her being, and that therfore I missed her altogether. It was not she,
and yet it was no one else. I would have recognized her among thousands of
other women, yet I did not 'find' her. I recognized her differentially, not
essentially. Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor;
straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images
partially true, and therefore totally false.' pp. 65-66.
comprendre ma gnralit; mais l'ayant comprise, invinciblement, je

m'en chappais. Dans la Mre, il y avait un noyau rayonnant,
irrductible: ma mre' (La Chambre claire, p. 117)31. In this Barthes
also effectively turns around Lacan's mirror-stage, which he refers to
in the caption to one of the photographs in Roland Barthes of him as
a baby in his mother's lap: 'Le stade du miroir: 'tu es cela'' (Roland
Barthes, p. 25). Now he has found a photograph of his mother as a
child which he can point to and say 'that is you'.
Barthes talks about two dimensions of photographs, studium
(cultural, social, or intellectual interest) and punctum (essential,
emotional interest). He finds the punctum in only one photograph of
his mother, all the others somehow fail to capture her. This splitting of
the interest in photography is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's theory
on works of art:
Works of art are received and valued on different planes.

Two polar types stand out: with one, the accent is on the
cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the
work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects
destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what
mattered was their existence, not their being on view.32
If we can equate Barthes's punctum with Benjamin's cult value - at

least in the instance of the photograph of Barthes's mother - it would
explain why that photograph is not printed in the book. It is enough
that it exists, it does not have an exhibition value and Barthes's interest
is a one-man cult that could not include others.
John Tagg in his discussion of Barthes maintains that Barthes
finding his mother in a photograph is a complete illusion that denies
the reality of photographs:
31 'when I confronted the Winter Garden Photograph I gave myself up to the

Image, to the Image-Repertoire. Thus I could understand my generality; but
having understood it, invincibly I escaped from it. In the Mother, there was a
radiant, irreducible core: my mother.' p. 75.
32 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992),
pp. 211-245, p. 218.
240 Borderlines
This is not the inflection of a prior (though irreversible)

reality, as Barthes would have us believe, but the
production of a new and specific reality, the photograph,
which becomes meaningful in certain transactions and has
real effects, but which cannot refer or be referred to a pre-
photographical reality as to a truth. The photograph is not a
magical 'emanation' but a material product of a material
apparatus set to work in specific contexts, by specific
forces, for more or less defined purposes. It requires,
therefore, not an alchemy but a history, outside which the
existential essence of photography is empty and cannot
deliver what Barthes desires: the confirmation of an
existence; the mark of a past presence; the repossession of
his mother's body.33
This rather stern denial of the possibility of photographs is disproved

in a way by all the authors I discuss here. In their discussion of
photographs of their parents there is a constant acknowledgment of a
certain confirmation of an existence. Writers like Barthes are certainly
aware of the cultural influences in the production of meaning, but
photography, which Barthes finds to be the supremely referential art,
still seems to those writers and many others to have 'the mark of the
past presence'.
It must also be stressed that Barthes does not claim that photographs
are the past: 'j'aime certains traits biographiques qui, dans la vie d'un
crivain, m'enchantent l'gal de certaines photographies; j'ai appel
ces traits des 'biographmes'; la Photographie a le mme rapport
l'Histoire que le biographme la biographie' (La Chambre claire, p.
54)34. And later in La Chambre claire Barthes has this to say on
33 Tagg, op. cit., p. 3. Lury claims: 'But Tagg's declaration is dubious not
only because it is premised upon psychoanalytic diagnosis of a subject who is
a construct of Tagg's own reading of the text, but because he presents a
reductive interpretation of the way of seeing photographically that Barthes
elucidates. As noted above, Barthes claims that the photograph justifies the
spectator's desire, not that it satisfies it.' op. cit., p. 89.
34 'In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's
life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features
likeness which highlights the fact that he is well aware of the cultural
implications of photography:
C'est ce qui se passe lorsque je juge telle photo

'ressemblante'. Pourtant, en y rflchissant, je suis bien
oblig de me demander: qui ressemble qui? La
ressemblance est une conformit, mais quoi? une
identit. Or, cette identit est imprcise, imaginaire mme,
au point que je puis continuer parler de 'ressemblance',
sans avoir jamais vu le modle. (La Chambre claire, p.
157)35
But Barthes also knows that his dream of signifying nothing cannot
come true. As Elizabeth Barrett says in the letter I quoted above, it is
not merely the likeness, but the very shadow of the person we feel is
there, and whether that only happens through certain technical
processes and history seems almost beside the point. At least it is
something that is well worth writing on and something that Barthes
feels critical language is not well equipped to deal with.
The question of the referent is important to Barthes in two main
areas: autobiography and photography. Barthes's move to photography
in his most 'personal' work is prefigured in Roland Barthes, but in La
Chambre claire the pull of the referent, the autobiographical pull has
come to the fore, and it is a perfect example of the strong referentiality
of photographs. Barthes's move to photography is also a movement to
the autobiographical, it highlights how we can never distance
ourselves completely from the referent either in photographs or
autobiographies. Neither is simply an artefact, it is always lodged
within someone's life. The photographs in Roland Barthes remind us
of that referentiality, and although Barthes tries to escape the usual
'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the

biographeme has to biography.' p. 30.
35 'This is what happens when I judge a certain photograph "a likeness." Yet
on thinking it over, I must ask myself: Who is like what? Resemblance is a
conformity, but to what? to an identity. Now this identity is imprecise, even
imaginary, to the poin where I can continue to speak of "likeness" without
ever having seen the model.' pp. 100-102.
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trappings of autobiography, the text is still ultimately

autobiographical.
To read La Chambre claire as a treatise on photography and ignore
the autobiographical aspects of it, that is to look at the discourse as
theoretical rather than autobiographical, is to miss a part of the
point.36 The text poses problems to any theoretical reading when
Barthes 'finds' his mother in a photograph of her as a child, but within
the framework of autobiographical writing that moment is clearly
recognisable. This text seen in the context of the use of photographs in
autobiography can further illuminate the punctum, or the moment of
recognition, which occurs frequently in autobiographies as I hope to
show in the discussion below.
3. Photographs and Memory
3.1. The Absence of Photographs in Georges Perec's W ou

le souvenir d'enfance
As I discussed in the first chapter Georges Perec's autobiography is

very much concerned with the themes of memory and forgetting. I
want to add to and expand that discussion here by looking at his
treatment of photographs in the text. The book is not illustrated with
photographs but photographs are nevertheless a part of Perec's tale of
his childhood memories, even though his memory is not his strong
36 See for instance Writing the Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel
Rabat (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997). In these essays
there is a notable lack of any discussion of the autobiographical features of
La chambre claire in the writers' discussion of the meaning of the punctum
and little mention of memory with the exception of Derek Attridge's essay
'Roland Barthes's Obtuse, Sharp Meaning and the Responsibilties of
Commentary' pp. 77-89 and Marjorie Perloff's '"What has occurred only
once." Barthes's Winter Garden/Boltanski's Archives of the Dead' pp. 32-58,
where she links Barthes's ideas and Boltanski's photographical project by
emphasising the importance of memory, be it individual or collective.
point, and the documentation insubstantial, and he has the help only
of 'des photos jaunies'.37
These yellowing snapshots can be seen as symbols of Perec's lack of
knowledge and memory of his parents. The photographs do not call
forth any memories or images from the past. They are the material
which exposes the gaps in the narrator's life. Perec has no abundance
of photographs to choose from, no family album. The photographs
mentioned in the text are described in extreme detail, right down to
what is written on the back of them, in a rather cool though at times
witty manner. The photographs are all of his parents who died when
Perec was very young:
Je possde une photo de mon pre et cinq de ma mre (au

dos de la photo de mon pre, j'ai essay d'crire, la craie,
un soir que j'tais ivre, sans doute en 1955 ou 1956: 'Il y a
quelque chose de pourri dans le royaume de Danemark.'
Mais je n'ai mme pas russi tracer la fin du quatrime
mot). De mon pre, je n'ai d'autre souvenir que celui de
cette cl ou pice qu'il m'aurait donne un soir en revenant
de son travail. De ma mre, le seul souvenir que me reste
est celui du jour o elle m'accompagna la gare de Lyon
d'o, avec un convoi de la Croix-Rouge, je partis pour
Villard-de-Lans: bien que je n'aie rien de cass, je parte le
bras en charpe. Ma mre m'achte un Charlot intitul
Charlot parachutiste: sur la couverture illustre, les
suspentes du parachute ne sont rien d'autre que les bretelles
du pantalon de Charlot. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p.
41)38
37 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance (Paris: ditions Denol,

1975), p. 22. (Hereafter quoted in the text with David Bellos' translation in
footnotes.)
38 'I possess one photograph of my father and five of my mother (on the
back of the photograph of my father, one evening when I was drunk,
probably in 1955 or 1956, I tried to chalk: "There is something rotten in the
state of Denmark." But I didn't even manage to scrawl to the end of the fourth
word). I have no memory of my father other than the one about the key or
coin he might have given me one evening on his return from work. The oly
surviving memory of of my mother is of the day she took me to the Gare de
Lyon, which is were I left for Villard-de-lans in a Red Cross convoy: though
244 Borderlines
Perec's attempt at finding some subtext (Hamlet, Oedipus) to his

relationship with his father is doomed, he cannot even finish the
sentence on the back of the photograph. The fact is that he has only
one vague memory of his father giving him something that he believes
was a coin or a key. The memory of his mother is also proven to be
partly wrong - apparently he was not wearing his arm in a sling,
although he is right about the cover of the magazine.39
The very detailed descriptions of the photographs; of what everyone
is wearing, their posture and the background, remind us of the lack the
whole autobiography describes: a lack of memory, of name. The
photographs for Perec do not invoke joy (as in Barthes), memory (as
in Auster) or self-knowledge (or self-invention) as in Duras. They are
historical documents that do not give out any information beyond their
appearance, clues to a gap, a lack, to nothing. A key (like the one his
father gave him) that opens nothing. In Barthes's terms there is no
punctum, only studium.
In a section written fifteen years earlier which is printed in the text
with notes and corrections, Perec describes two photographs of his
father. Of the first one he says:
Sur la photo le pre a l'attitude du pre. Il est grand. Il a la

tte nue, il tient son calot la main. Sa capote descend trs
bas. Elle est serre la taille par l'un de ces ceinturons de
gros cuir qui ressemblent aux sangles des vitres dans les
wagons de troisime classe. On devine, entre les godillots
nets de poussire - c'est dimanche - et le bas de la capote,
les bandes molletires interminables. Le pre sourit. C'est
un simple soldat. Il est en permission Paris, c'est la fin de
I have no broken vones, I wear my arm in a sling. My mother buys me a

comic entitled Charlie and the Parachute: on the illustrated cover, the
parachute's rigging lines are nothing other than Charlie's trousers' bracing.' W
or The Memory of Childhood, trans. David Bellos (London: Harvill Press,
1988), p. 26.
39 In a book of photographs from Perec's life, Georges Perec, Images by
Jacques Neefs and Hans Hartje (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1993), the cover is
reproduced along with the photographs Perec describes in his book.
l'hiver, au bois de Vincennes. (W ou le souvenir d'enfance,

p. 42)40
There are several things of interest here. The father Perec hardly
remembers 'a l'attitude du pre' and the photograph therefore becomes
a proof that he in fact was Perec's father despite Perec's lack of
memory. But the question remains how does one pose as a father
when the picture does not include the child? A layer of objectivity is
introduced by describing him as 'le pre' as opposed to 'mon pre' as it
refers to the cultural image of the 'father'. His father's pose agrees with
this cultural image and thereby proves his fatherhood. In the notes to
this description Perec casts doubt on the two things that cannot be
determined from the photograph itself, the time and the place:
'Dimanche, permission, bois de Vincennes: rien ne permet de
l'affirmer' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 49).41 With these notes the
atmosphere Perec has created in the description of the photograph is
stripped away, and even the description of his father's clothes is
corrected. What does at first sight seem a detailed, rather objective
description of a photograph has become suspect like many of Perec's
memories.
Perec also describes photographs of his mother, and of one of them
he says:
La mre et l'enfant donnent l'image d'un bonheur que les

ombres du photographe exaltent. Je suis dans les bras de ma
mre [. . .] J'ai des cheveux blonds avec un trs joli cran sur
le front (de tous les souvenirs qui me manquent, celui-l est
peut-tre celui que j'aimerais le plus fortement avoir: ma
40 'The father in the photograph poses like a father. He is tall. He is

bareheaded, holding his kepi in his hand. his greatcoat comes down very low.
It is gathered at the waist by one of those thick leather belts that remind you
of the window straps in third-class railway carriages. Between the polished
military boots - it is Sunday - and the hem of the greatcoat you can just make
out that there are interminable puttees. The father is smiling. he is a private.
He is on leave in Paris; it is the end of winter, in the Bois de Vincennes.' p.
27.
41 'Sunday, leave, Bois de Vincennes: there's no basis for any of this.' p. 33.
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mre me coiffant, me faisant cette ondulation savante). (W

ou le souvenir d'enfance, pp. 69-70)42
Again Perec distances himself from the photograph by not saying 'my
mother' but uses the more generic description 'mother and child'. It
points to the generic qualities of photographs, the conformity of
photographs, as this one denotes the classic mother and child image,
rather than Perec's mother specifically. But they do make a picture of
happiness, reinforced by the creator of the photograph. Everything is
described in minute detail, but here the photograph does not conjure
up a memory, but a lack of memory, memory that Perec wished he
had, but which the photograph in fact proves he does not have. The
event photographed certainly took place, so it exposes Perec's lack of
memory.
The photographs Perec mentions are all described in great detail, and
in one of them even the animals are described closely. Perec lists not
only what can be seen in the photograph, but their size and shape and
what is written on the back. The photographs are therefore not only a
proof of one past moment, but they also carry with them the history of
the family's ownership of them. They are material artefacts that have
belonged to the family. The written details (sometimes wrong), and
how they have been cut to fit frames or albums, all bear witness to a
family history. A few bear Aunt Esther's handwriting, some Perec's
own and in some cases a handwriting that he does not recognise: 'c'est
peut-tre celle de ma mre, et ce serait alors le seul exemple que
j'aurais de son criture' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p. 74)43. The
photograph thereby becomes an even more important proof of his
mother's existence.
42 'Mother and child make a picture of happiness, enhanced by the

photographer's shading. I am in my mother's arms [. . .] I have fair hair with a
very pretty forelock (of all my missing memories, that is perhaps the one I
most dearly wish I had: my mother doing my hair, and making that cunning
curl).' p. 49.
43 'perhaps it is my mother's, which would make it the only sample of her
hand that I possess.' p. 52.
The question remains why the photographs are not printed with the
text. One can conjecture that it is perhaps because here it is the
descriptions of the photographs that matter and not the photographs
themselves. The descriptions are part of Perec's hunt for his past; his
hunt for memories that are not there, for his parents who are not there.
By not printing the images, but describing them in minute detail,
Perec emphasises the tautology of photographs, mentioned by both
Barthes and Susan Sontag. Barthes claims in La Chambre claire: 'Par
nature, la Photographie [. . .] a quelque chose de tautologique: une
pipe y est toujours une pipe, intraitablement' (La Chambre claire, p.
17).44 But as is evident in W ou le souvenir d'enfance this tautology
only extends to people's physical appearance as Perec describes his
parents' clothes in detail but knows little of their character, thoughts or
emotions. Photographs, especially family photographs, are supposed
to serve as memory aids, they are supposed to evoke memories of
events, people and places of our past (as every Kodak advertisement
affirms). Hence the poignancy of Perec's descriptions. Everything that
is expected to be there - just as the reader expects the photographs to
be there - is missing, it does not evoke memories, only absence. The
documents are not important in themselves, only Perec's reading of
them. Their status as documents is called into question, they have to
invoke memories or they become only superficial shadows.
The lack of identity is also apparent in the discussion on names and
namelessness both in the childhood memories and in the story of the
island of W. The sportsmen shed their identity and take on the names
of others and Perec's own surname is a long story of misreadings and
mispronunciation. As Marcel Benabou points out: 'In Perec's works,
names not only serve to identify characters, they also serve to
highlight the identity problems that face them, and that face their
creator also.'45 Photographs do to a certain extent give people a name,
44 'By nature, the Photograph [. . .] has something tautological about it: a

pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe.' p. 5.
45 Marcel Benabou, 'Perec's Jewishness', The Review of Contemporary
Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 76-87, (p. 85).
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an outward identity. Richard Brilliant says of the connection between

names and portraits:
Namelessness, however, is not an unfamiliar condition in

the twentieth century; it is characteristic of the dispossessed
everywhere, of the prisoner and of the concentration camp
inhabitant [. . .] The lack of a name and of the name's
reference makes the visual representation, or portrayal, of
such a subject both futile and pointless. Indeed, before long,
one may expect that instead of an artist's profile the future
will preserve only complete actuarial files, stored in some
omniscient computer, ready to spew forth a different kind
of personal profile, beginning with one's Social Security
number. Then, and only then, will portraiture as a
distinctive genre of art disappear.46
The decisive event in Perec's childhood was the loss of his parents.
The descriptions of the photographs illustrate perfectly that loss and
how important they were in his life even though they were not there,
just as the photographs are not present in the book. It points to the
tautology of photographs, but also to their problematical status as
documents. It asks the question: what can photographs really tell us?
What kind of clues are they to the past without the aid of memory or
history? In this text the images are not sites of memory, signalling the
beginnings of stories, they only denote absence and forgetting. There
is no moment of recognition in Perec's description of the photographs,
but that does not mean that photographs cannot provide such a
moment, as one might say that the reason that Perec does describe
them in such detail is exactly this search for a moment of recognition,
even though it is constantly thwarted by his lack of memory.
46 Brilliant, op. cit., p. 174.

3.2. Photographs as Clues: Reading Photographs with Paul

Auster
In Paul Auster's work the photographs not only work on a thematic

level but on the level of narrative structure as well. Auster is more
explicit than Perec in explaining what the photographs he discusses in
his autobiography mean to him, and how they tell him something
about the people they depict. In his autobiographical work The
Invention of Solitude, the first part 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' is
written after his father's death. Auster is in his father's house sorting
out his father's possessions when he finds photographs of his father:
Discovering these photographs was important to me

because they seemed to reaffirm my father's physical
presence in the world, to give me the illusion that he was
still there. The fact that many of these pictures were ones I
had never seen before, especially the ones of his youth,
gave me the odd sensation that I was meeting him for the
first time, that a part of him was only just beginning to
exist. I had lost my father. But at the same time, I had also
found him. As long as I kept these pictures before my eyes,
as long as I continued to study them with complete
attention, it was as though he were still alive, even in death.
Or if not alive, at least not dead. Or rather, somehow
suspended, locked in a universe that had nothing to do with
death, in which death could never make an entrance.47
This echoes Barthes's find in the photograph of his mother. Auster has
'found' his father, and the photographs do in a sense keep his father
alive. They are not on the side of 'domination and death' as long as he
keeps looking at them. He uses the word 'presence' which the
photograph seems to carry with it, whether it be to denote our own
presence in the world or that of those who have died. These
photographs offer Auster solace in the middle of the traumatic
experience of having to pack away his father's life.
47 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London, Boston: Faber and Faber,
1988), p. 14. (Hereafter quoted in the text.)
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The photograph is intimately linked with death as it repeats

endlessly one moment in time (that is, of course, always past when we
see the photograph). We somehow crave that repetition; Auster needs
to keep looking at the photographs to keep his father from
disappearing. Susan Sontag claims that 'all photographs are memento
mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or
thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out
this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless
melt'.48 Rugg also points to the photograph as cenotaph: 'Both
photographs and autobiographies could be imagined as cenotaphs for
they indicate through their presence what is no longer here - the body
of the author.'49
In cases where the photograph is of someone who has died, as in
Barthes, Perec, Auster and Ondaatje, the photograph is what keeps
them alive. The images are all connected to the authors' attempts to
bring some meaning or cohesion to their memories of their parents.
Photographs are a material proof of the existence of these people, and
are therefore constantly evoked when the authors attempt to prevent
their parents from disappearing. The photograph's truth value is what
we always come back to. As Vicki Goldberg points out:
The photographic lie succeeds because photographs appear

to be so truthful. The fake disrupts two dearly held
expectations: that photographs report what was actually
there, and that seeing is believing - for photography
amounts to a surrogate for personal observation.50
I mentioned in my introduction that photographs in autobiographies

often look like excerpts from the family album. The family album is in
many cases at the centre of the family's memories, and can constitute
the image people have of their families (parents who do not take
photographs of their children are considered almost negligent). When
48 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 15.

49 Rugg, op. cit., p. 26.
50 Vicki Goldberg, The Power of Photography: How photographs changed
our lives (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), p. 89.
Auster explains in The Invention of Solitude that his family was not a
very happy one, he mentions the family album: 'One very big album,
bound in expensive leather with a gold-stamped title on the cover -
This is Our Life: The Austers - was totally blank inside' (The
Invention of Solitude, p. 14). There had been good intentions,
someone had gone to the trouble of buying the album but it was never
filled with snapshots of the Austers. The implication is that they had
no memories together. As Vicki Goldberg says in her discussion of
the birth of the family album: 'The album [in late nineteenth century]
offered families a cohesion that reality did not necessarily provide; the
dream of the perfect family slumbered within its covers.'51 There is no
such image available to Auster which illustrates his point about the
sadness prevalent in his family and its eventual break-up.
In a photograph of his father Auster finds what he considers to be
the perfect likeness:
From a bag of loose pictures: a trick photograph taken in an

Atlantic City studio sometime during the Forties. There are
several of him sitting around a table, each image shot from a
different angle, so that at first you think it must be a group
of several different men. Because of the gloom that
surrounds them, because of the utter stillness of their poses,
it looks as if they have gathered there to conduct a seance.
And then, as you study the picture, you begin to realize that
all these men are the same man. The seance becomes a real
seance, and it is as if he has come there only to invoke
himself, to bring himself back from the dead, as if, by
multiplying himself, he had inadvertently made himself
disappear. There are five of him there, and yet the nature of
the trick photography denies the possibility of eye contact
among the various selves. Each one is condemned to go on
staring into space, as if under the gaze of the others, but
seeing nothing, never able to see anything. It is a picture of
death, a portrait of an invisible man. (The Invention of
Solitude, p. 31)
51 Ibid., p. 105.
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Auster allocates to this photograph his father's core: his father's tricks
and invisibility. The description of it is at the centre of his writing on
his father; it epitomises all that Auster writes about him.52 His
carefree youth (symbolised by the entertainment mecca Atlantic City),
his being absent from his life, his death, his multiple lives, how he
eluded everyone, even the lady friends who all thought they were the
only one. It becomes a highly symbolic photograph through Auster's
writing on it. Yet, if it had only been included and not discussed this is
not the conclusion the reader would have immediately come to. At
most it may remind us of a similar photograph of Marcel Duchamp.
Not only is it a photograph of a man who was invisible to others, but
also of a man who sees nothing, who will never be able to see
anything. So instead of affirming his 'physical presence' in the world,
this is a photograph of death. Rugg points to this effect in photography
when she claims: 'If we imagine in one sense photography as a record
of the dead, we must also think of the psychological murder of the
photographic situation, and the photographed subject's struggle to
remain hauntingly alive.'53
This is the central theme of Auster's writing on his father. At first the
photographs seem to bring him back. Auster believes he has 'found'
him, just as by writing on him he thought he would 'find' him, but all
he finds is an invisible man, one who was impossible to know and the
photograph becomes a 'picture of death' as if he had always been in
some sense 'dead', never 'present'. The trick photograph captures this
quality of the man, something that was clearly individual to him, but it
is a trick photograph, and the question remains whether or not we
would all look like 'invisible men' photographed in this way (just as
everyone looks like a criminal in 'mug-shots').
Just as autobiography always moves between the individual and the
universal, so photographs have long been used not only to capture the
52 As Rugg points out: 'One might say that photographs embody Benjamin's
historic moment, for the viewing of photographs always enacts the
imbrication of past and present moments, forcing them into a constellation in
the viewer's mind.' op. cit., p. 67.
53 Ibid., p. 114.
individual but to assert the universal as Alan Sekula explains in

discussing the role of photography in the nineteenth century:
At the same time, photographic portraiture began to

perform a role no painted portrait could have performed in
the same thorough and rigorous fashion. This role derived,
not from any honorific portrait tradition, but from the
imperatives of medical and anatomical illustration. Thus
photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the
other, to define both the generalized look - the typology -
and the contingent instance of deviance and social
pathology.54
This is particular to photography. It can affirm or reinstate our

presence in the world, while at the same time it makes us into types,
whether it be for medical purposes, or to establish some kind of
deviance, or conformity, as in the more mundane instance of the
passport photograph.
There is another equally significant photograph in The Invention of
Solitude, and one that hides a dark reality, a terrible family secret.
Auster's grandmother murdered his grandfather, but the description of
a family photograph hides the awful truth:
And then I realized what was strange about the picture: my

grandfather had been cut out of it. The image was distorted
because part of it had been eliminated. My grandfather had
been sitting in a chair next to his wife with one of his sons
standing between his knees - and he was not there. Only his
fingertips remained: as if he were trying to crawl back into
the picture from some hole deep in time, as if he had been
exiled to another dimension. The whole thing made me
shake. (The Invention of Solitude, p. 34)
This is, of course, what had happened; Auster's grandfather had been
excised from the family's memories. He was never mentioned and
each of his sons gave different versions of his death. It is not until
54 Allan Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive', October 39 (Winter 1986), 3-
65 (p. 6).
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Auster is a grown man that he finds out, by coincidence, the truth.

Everything is in the photograph: the whole horror of the murder
repeated by cutting the grandfather out of the photograph, only his
fingertips remaining as his story is finally told. It is one more proof of
how seriously we take photographs, as when people cut up pictures of
their lovers after a break-up. It is one more instance where a
photograph is a part of the subject and not just a likeness and where
the family album pretends to include the perfect family but in reality
hides an awful truth; the ultimate family breakdown. It is as if by
cutting the grandfather out of the picture the family could erase the
past and restore the perfect family image. As Sontag points out:
'Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are
inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.'55
That is why they can play such a pivotal role in autobiographies.
The two photographs reproduced in The Invention of Solitude operate
as two types of clue. The trick photograph of his father is for Auster a
clue to his father's personality and his life, and works in the text as a
symbol for his father's life. The other photograph Auster uses as a clue
for the reader to the dark family secret that sheds light on his father's
character. Auster significantly only writes about the murder halfway
through the writing on his father in order to invoke his own
experience as he only learned the facts, by chance, as an adult. Both
photographs serve to put the reader in Auster's footsteps and illustrate
the relationship between the events themselves and the writing of the
events. What is of interest, of course, is that both photographs have
been tampered with in different ways. The trick photograph does not
attempt a realistic capturing of its model but plays with our belief in
the truth-value of photographs, still managing for Auster to 'capture'
his father, whilst the torn photograph has been tampered with in an
effort to hide a family secret. Again, the status of photographs as
documents is questioned, but in this text they still serve as vital clues
to the past. As Goldberg points out: 'The photograph, produced by a
55 Sontag, op. cit, p. 23.

brief transaction between chemicals and light, is at once the most

faithful and the most seductive of witnesses.'56
4. The Lost Photograph: Michael Ondaatje's Documents
The issues discussed above - Barthes's ideas on likeness in

photography and Auster's limited but highly conscious choice of
photographs - illustrate how important photographs are to our
perception of ourselves, our families, and our past. Photographs often
have a deep personal significance for us (for instance photographs of
dead relatives), much more so than paintings or drawings usually
have. This denotes a similar importance letters can have (hand-written
love letters for instance). As Sontag points out:
Our irrepressible feeling that the photographic process is

something magical has a genuine basis. No one takes an
easel painting to be in any sense co-substantial with its
subject; it only represents or refers. But a photograph is not
only like its subject, a homage to the subject. It is part of,
an extension of that subject; and a potent means of
acquiring it, of gaining control over it.57
This attempt at gaining control over the subject is similar to the

control over others one gains by writing about them. This is what the
autobiographers discussed here attempt with their parents.
Michael Ondaatje had dealt with photographs before he wrote his
autobiography, especially in his book on Billy the Kid. It is quickly
apparent that his use of documents in that text is highly unorthodox.
On the title page of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid there is an
empty frame and an accompanying text claiming it to be a photograph
of Billy. There are several photographs included in the text, but none
of Billy. Most of the photographs look as if they are from the period.
They are of people and places, houses, interiors, landscapes. There is
56 Goldberg, op. cit., p. 19.

57 Sontag, op. cit., p. 155.
256 Borderlines
one of a couple dressed in clothes from the period inserted in the

middle of a story about Billy's friends Sally and John Chisum.
The photograph on the last page is a small one set in one corner of
an empty frame of someone dressed in a cowboy outfit. Their
presence gives a feeling of authenticity as only photographs can,
providing local colour and feeling for the environment. None of these
photographs have captions. In reality only a few of these photographs
are from the period in question. Some Ondaatje took himself, the
couple are friends of his dressed up, and the last photograph is in fact
of Ondaatje himself as a boy. In this way our - some would say naive -
belief that photographs are proof: evidence of what things were really
like, is played with and turned on its head, as it is not just the past one
enters through the photograph, but also the present. And at the end
Ondaatje has inserted himself in the empty frame of the title page.
So it is with all the documents quoted in the text. Some are authentic
and some made-up, but all are treated as equally valid. William Bell
explains what effect the combination of the factual and the fictional
has in Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot: 'there are two kinds of
discourse, one of them fact-led, the other not. The effect of
juxtaposing the two is to sow confusion and to force on the reader a
re-examination of what s/he believes historiography to be.'58 It forces
us to look at the power of photographs, the effect of eye-witness
accounts, and to re-examine how the past is always mediated to us.
We have to look no further than to Ondaatje's own entry in Who's Who
to realise that even what we think of as real and valid documents are
not necessarily trustworthy as editions of Who's Who from 1969-1992
described Michael Ondaatje as the breeder of the famous Sydenham
Spaniel.
But why is there no photograph of Billy? Is the empty frame on the
title page perhaps filled with the text? Is it a way to start with a clean
slate, instead of the fixed image of a person? And is Ondaatje positing
himself there as the last photograph is in the corner of a page-size
58 William Bell, 'Not Altogether a Tomb: Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot',

in Imitating Art: Essays in Biography, ed. David Ellis (London: Pluto Press,
1993), pp. 148-173, pp. 150-151.
empty frame? How does a biographer enter his or her subject's life?
Or perhaps a better question would be: How does a poet enter the life
of a legendary outlaw? Ondaatje's Billy explains it thus: 'Not a story
about me through their eyes then. Find the beginning, the slight silver
key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in.'59 It
is not a story through 'their' eyes, and therefore there is no photograph
taken through their eyes. But it is a story through Ondaatje's eyes. In
biography there is always someone looking. As I mentioned in the
previous chapter Saul Bellow once described biography as 'a specter
viewed by a specter'. It is a maze to begin, not to get out of, but to be
in. Billy's voice describes events from beyond the grave, becoming a
true spectre.
Ondaatje's autobiography Running in the Family is full of the
writer's discoveries about his own and his family's life in Sri Lanka, as
I discussed in an earlier chapter. He is a traveller coming back home
after many years of exile to find out about his origins and the meaning
of that origin. There are a few photographs in the book, the most
important one being of his parents:
My Aunt pulls out the albums and there is the photograph I

have been waiting for all my life. My father and mother
together. May 1932 [. . .] Everything is there, of course.
Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual
humour, and the fact that both of them are hams of a very
superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were
absolutely perfect for each other. My father's tanned skin,
my mother's milk paleness, and this theatre of their own
making. It is the only photograph I have found of the two of
them together.60
It was a marriage marred by the father's alcoholism and they were

divorced when Ondaatje was quite young. So Ondaatje naturally
desires to find that they were in fact happy at some point, that his
59 Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed

poems (London: Picador, 1989), p. 20.
60 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), pp.
161-162.
258 Borderlines
origin is not completely marked with unhappiness. So not only does

Ondaatje desire to find this image/likeness, he wants it to correspond
to the meaning he has given it, that his origin is not arbitrary, he wants
it to have a specific meaning.
The photograph is taken shortly after their marriage and it shows
them making faces at the camera, and they have written on it: 'What
we think of married life'. Ondaatje's parents are the creators of that
photograph, not only because of their poses, but also because they
gave it a title, and therefore for Ondaatje the 'evidence' he needed. W.
J. T. Mitchell has posed this question of our belief in photographs:
How do we account for the stubbornness of the naive,

superstitious view of photography? What could possibly
motivate the persistence in erroneous beliefs about the
radical difference between images and words, and the
special status of photography? Are these mistaken beliefs
simply conceptual errors, like mistakes in arithemetic? Or
are they more on the order of ideological beliefs,
convictions that resist change?61
In his book on Billy the Kid Ondaatje experimented freely with

photography: playing with the reader's expectation of photographs as
documents: and with our belief that photographs offer proof of an
existence. But when it comes to the autobiographical text the
emphasis shifts. The photograph of his parents is one he claims to
have been looking for all of his life. There is no doubt or suspicion of
the meaning of that photograph, which echoes the way Barthes's move
towards photography constituted a move towards autobiography.
Ondaatje in his autobiographical mode discards his own previous
attempts to alert us to the nature of photographs as witness. It is a
staged photograph of his parents, yet 'true'. Perhaps its 'truthfulness'
lies in its unconventionality as a wedding photograph, as conventional
wedding photography is a very structured form where the individual is
fitted into a universal structure. But Ondaatje's parents have staged
61 W. J. T. Mitchell, 'The Ethics of Form in the Photographic Essay',

Afterimage 6 (1989) 8-13, (p. 8). Quoted in Rugg, op. cit., p. 80.
their own photograph and written the caption, and it therefore is

individual to them - their own creation rather than the photographer's -
and seemingly 'says' something about their marriage. And Ondaatje
does not make any sweeping deductions, only that they shared the
same humour, that perhaps they were happy.
This need for evidence or clues, for what Tagg calls the
'confirmation of an existence', is evident in all the texts I have
discussed. Whether or not these photographs have some intrinsic,
essential meaning, is not for the reader to judge. What interests me far
more is that that is how these authors look at them and write about
them. The notion that photographs are a confirmation of an existence,
and also a confirmation of memories is common to all of them. It is
not to say that the authors believe that photographs can capture the
inner life, the self, the identity (or whatever we want to call it) of their
subjects, suffice it to say that these autobiographers use photographs
to get closer to their subject. Rugg explains:
Thus photographs, as our most natural sign, become the

most troublesome [. . .] it would seem that there are certain
aspects of photography and autobiography that are inherent
in the media in their role as signs, that do not change
appreciably over time: the relation of the sign to death, the
problem of identifying a unique and/or integrated self in the
flurry of signs, the desire to textualize (and thus control)
photographic images, the sense of photography as a
metaphor for memory, the relation of the photograph to the
name or word, the publication of the private.62
Barthes's discussion of photography is an effect of his uneasiness with
being torn between two languages, the expressive and the critical. For
him photography allows for the two to coincide. The fascination for
photographs that he talks about in Roland Barthes is explained in both
critical and expressive terms, as studium and punctum. It also allows
him to write on his mother and how her death affected him. Barthes
'finds' his mother in a photograph which confirms for him not only her
existence, but also his memory of her, the way in which he knew her.
62 Rugg, op. cit., p. 234.

260 Borderlines
In Perec's case his description of the photographs of his parents is

consistent with the style of the book as a whole and the lack of
memory he describes. His problem is that he did not know his parents
so the photographs only serve as evidence of their physical
appearance. He does not claim to 'find' them or remember them, but
the photographs still offer proof for him that they once existed and
that he once knew them, and their status as documents is never
doubted.
Auster and Ondaatje find a part of their family history in
photographs, and clues about the character of their parents, and both
use the photographs as a vehicle for writing on their parents. The use
of photographs in these books is strongly linked to the problems these
autobiographers wrestle with, Barthes on the subject, Perec on
memory, Ondaatje's search for his father, and Auster on father-son
relationships.
All in all I believe the use of photographs in autobiographies can
have much broader implications than is apparent at first sight. They
can and often do highlight the main themes and preoccupation of
autobiographies, such as memory, relationship to parents, to the past,
fictionality, self-invention and self-image. At the same time they serve
to remind us of our relationship to photographs: their truth value,
transparency, their value as clues or evidence of the past. In all this it
does not matter very much what the photographs look like, whether
they are good or bad (we all know what a trying experience it can be
to go through other people's family albums). It is what the writers
make of them, how they use them in the text, whether as a source of
memory, of creativity, or of new understanding, that counts.
Yet photographs and text sit uneasily together, as one can never
encompass the other. The photograph can never fully represent the
text, just as the text can never exhaust all the image says, hence the
decision by some autobiographers to leave out the photographs. The
two do not come together in synthesis, there is always some kind of
tension between them. So even when dealing with the most referential
of art forms, the autobiographer has constantly to deal with the
complex relationship between the autobiographical process and
fiction. As the above texts demonstrate the meaning of the photograph
in autobiography is to a large extent reliant on the context in which it

is placed, in other words on the memory (or lack of memory) it
represents.
Conclusion
Postmodernism and Borderlines
Let me propose a simple myth of its
genesis, a sort of Origin of the Species.
The problematic, delightful, and disputed
nature of biography derives from its
original two forbears, who one secret,
sultry morning formed an Unholy
Alliance. Fiction married Fact, without
the benefit of clergy. Or as I prefer to
say, Invention formed a love-match with
Truth. These are the Adam and Eve of
our subject. The result was a brilliant,
bastard form - Biography - which has
been causing trouble ever since.1
Throughout this work my contention has been that one can locate
borderlines between autobiography and fiction in various areas of
autobiographical writing. These borderlines can be found in the
relationship between remembering and writing, in narrative structure,
in the treatment of gender, in writing on the experience of crossing
cultures, in the presence of biography in autobiography, and in the use
of photographs in autobiography. In locating these borderlines we
have also seen how the relationship between the fictional and
autobiographical aspects of life-writing can be a close one, as can be
seen for instance in the close connection between memory, writing,
and fiction, so that one would be hard pressed to define them as two
distinct (and opposing) modes of discourse. The (trouble-causing)
form, biography, and its sister genre, autobiography seem inevitably
to oscillate between facts and fictions.
A conscious transgression of borders and genres in life-writing can
also be seen as a postmodern trait. But as Marjorie Garber reminds us
the use of fiction in auto/biography is not a postmodern phenomenon
in itself:
1 Richard Holmes, 'Biography: Inventing the Truth', in The Art of Literary

Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 15-25, p.
15.
264 Borderlines
For the biographer and the autobiographer, postmodernity

means understanding that there is no secure external
vantage point from which one can see clearly and
objectively, can 'realize' the subject. As if biographers ever
thought they were doing that. That biography - and, even
more, autobiography - is a species of fiction-making is a
truth so old that only a willed cultural amnesia can make it
new.2
But despite this assertion Garber also points out that the borderline
between fiction and non-fiction has been a specific preoccupation of
postmodernism:
If poststructuralism bequeaths to biography the question of

the split subject, postmodernism acts out that ambivalent
bequest, testing and transgressing the borderline between
'fiction' and 'reality' or 'fiction' and 'nonfiction' in novels,
films, and popular culture.3
This feature of postmodernism is one Linda Hutcheon dwells on as

well: 'The most radical boundaries crossed, however, have been those
between fiction and non-fiction and - by extension - between art and
life.'4 And Marjorie Perloff maintains that 'postmodern texts are
regularly seen as problematizing prior forms, as installing one mode
only to contest it'.5 So even though fiction has long been part of the
genre of autobiography, this radical crossing of boundaries and
negotiation of borderlines can be seen as specific to postmodern
experiments with the genre.
2 Marjorie Garber, 'Postmodernism and the Possibility of Biography', in

The Seductions of Biography, eds. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New
York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175-177, p. 175.
3 Ibid., p. 176.
4 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction
(London: Routledge, 1988), p. 10.
5 Marjorie Perloff, 'Introduction', in Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie
Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 3-10, p. 4.
Postmodernism and Borderlines 265
But let us first look at another defining feature of postmodernism -

its relationship to the past - and how that can affect our ideas about the
possibilities of representing the past in life-writing. Umberto Eco
describes postmodernism's relation to the past thus:
the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can

go no further, because it has produced a meta language that
speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The
postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing
that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its
destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with
irony, not innocently.6
The response to postmodernism's 'revisiting' of the past varies

between Linda Hutcheon's enthusiastic endorsement of
postmodernism's view of the past to Fredric Jameson's harsh critique
of its superficiality.7 What critics tend to agree upon is that
6 Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, trans. William

Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1984), p. 67.
7 Linda Hutcheon claims: 'I offer, then, a specific, if polemical, start from
which to operate: as a cultural activity that can be discerned in most art forms
and many currents of thought today, what I want to call postmodernism is
fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political.
Its contradictions may well be those of late capitalist society, but whatever
the cause, these contradictions are certainly manifest in the important
postmodern concept of "the presence of the past".' op. cit., p. 4. See also
Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism',
New Left Review 146 (1984) 53-92. Hayden White charts how this affects
historiography: 'Indeed, it is only by troping, rather than by logical deduction,
that any given set of the kinds of past events we would wish to call 'historical'
can be (first) represented as having the order of a chronicle; (secondly)
transformed by emplotment into a story with identifiable beginning, middle,
and end phases, and (thirdly) constituted as the subject of whatever formal
arguments may be adduced to establish their 'meanings' - cognitive, ethical,
or aesthetic, as the case may be. These three tropological abductions occur in
the composition of every historical discourse, even those which, as in modern
structuralist historiography, eschew storytelling and try to limit themselves to
statistical analyses of institutions and long-term, effectively synchronic,
ecological and ethnological processes.' '"Figuring the Nature of the Times
266 Borderlines
postmodernism is preoccupied with the past, although the value of the

outcome of this preoccupation is contested. This fascination with the
past has, of course, implications for the genre of autobiography. It can
both explain autobiography's popularity at the present time and can be
said to inform many experiments with the genre, as autobiographers
attempt new ways of representing the past, distrusting commonplaces
and conventions.
This great interest in the past is coloured by an awareness of the
difficulty in representing it, and by the knowledge that the past is
always already mediated. But there is also an acknowledgement that
we can never escape the past, so we must carry on examining it and
working with its influences in our cultural practices. Hutcheon points
out that postmodernism 'does not deny the existence of the past; it
does question whether we can ever know that past other than through
its textualized remains'.8 This is an important issue in the context of
how autobiographers negotiate the borderlines between auto-
biography and fiction. Many of the autobiographers discussed in this
work show an awareness of these considerations, for instance Paul
Auster with his attempts to make sense of the past while constantly
doubting the possibility of such a task, and this is also apparent when
Michael Ondaatje experiments with genres in order to represent a
fragmented past. Hutcheon claims in her discussion of Ondaatje's
Running in the Family that:
To write self-reflectively of history as process in progress,

instead of as a completed product, is to break down the
finality of formal narrative closure. Such a self-conscious
opening up of the borders of both history and narrative is a
postmodernist restating of the traditional (and perhaps
obligatory) mimetic connection between art and life.9
Deceased": Literary Theory and Historical Writing', in The Future of Literary

Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-44, p. 26.
8 Hutcheon, op. cit., p. 20.
9 Linda Hutcheon, 'Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge',
in Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki (Montreal:
Vehicule Press, 1985), pp. 301-314, p. 312.
This process, this opening up of borders, is also apparent in Roland

Barthes's use of the fragment in his autobiography, and in Jenny
Diski's play on traditional closure in her memoir. One could say that
autobiographers all have to search for a structure that would
encapsulate their experiences, acknowledging, as for instance Eva
Hoffman does, that these structures are human constructs that have to
be constantly reworked to fit the shape of our experiences.
Hutcheon calls texts that display this awareness of our problematic
knowledge of the past historiographic metafiction: 'Historiographic
metafiction incorporates all three of these domains: that is, its
theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs
(historiographic metafiction) is made the grounds for its rethinking
and reworking of the forms and contents of the past.'10 But as regards
autobiography Johnnie Gratton points out the limits of Hutcheon's
definition:
In fact one begins to find it regrettable that Hutcheon did

not leave her definition of the postmodern novel more open,
for the paradoxical/complex form we encounter most
prominently in the contemporary French domain is not so
much 'historiographic metafiction' [. . .] as a mode we could
justifiably call 'autobiographic(al) meta-fiction'.11
Hutcheon does not mention the rethinking and reworking of

autobiographical features so prominent in the last years. Her
definition, with its emphasis on history, leaves out elements that are of
great import in autobiographical writing, such as the role of memory
and the role narrative plays in the construction of a life story. Both are
features that have been under much scrutiny in recent years in life-
writing and have not escaped the influence of postmodern trends.
10 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 5.

11 Johnnie Gratton, 'Postmodern French Fiction: Practice and Theory', in
The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the present,
ed. Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.
242-260, p. 245.
268 Borderlines
The rethinking of the representation of the past necessitates a search

for forms that would represent our connections to the past.
Postmodernist writers are not attempting to establish completely new
forms, but rather to rework and revisit old ones. And with that they
constantly cross the borderlines of genres as Hutcheon points out:
the categories of genre are regularly challenged these days.

Fiction looks like biography (Banville's Kepler),
autobiography (Ondaatje's Running in the Family), history
(Rushdie's Shame). Theoretical discourse joins forces with
autobiographical memoir and Proustian reminiscence in
Barthes's Camera Lucida, where a theory of photography
grows out of personal emotion with no pretence to
objectivity, finality, authority.12
This crossover between genres is a constant feature of recent life-

writing. There is an alignment between postmodernism and
autobiography in this instance, as autobiography has always been a
notoriously 'fluid' genre, difficult to pin down and has always
borrowed from other genres. This trangression also manifests itself in
other areas. Fascination and experimentation with biographies,
memoirs, and family histories have spilled into other genres, such as
film (for example Frederico Fellini's Amarcord (1974), Tim Burton's
Ed Wood (1994) and Alan Berliner's My Father (1996)), theatre (for
example 'Ursula Martinez Presents a Family Outing'), and postmodern
biographies, such as Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot. This
fascination is, of course, part of postmodernism's constant tendency to
look back, to re-examine, and to rework the past.
There are also other aspects of postmodernism (especially as regards
the novel) that do not impinge on autobiographical writing. For
instance Gerhard Hoffmann maintains that: 'The postmodern author
relinquishes the dialectics of both guilt and innocence, meaning and
nonmeaning, and modifies the tragic into the absurd or in effect
12 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 60.

dissolves both in counterhumour.'13 The absurd, counterhumour, and

such like, seldom have a place in autobiography, and autobiographers
are hard pressed to give up completely the dialectics of meaning and
non-meaning.
But doubts about the possibilities of the representation of the past
are common in the texts I have discussed. Doubts about the power of
memory (Hellman, Perec), about the possibilities of narrative
(Handke) and the breakdown of chronology (Auster, Ondaatje), all
point to this questioning. A sense of inconclusiveness (Handke,
Diski), and an opening up of the past by entertaining notions of
retrospective possibilities, or alternative lives (Hoffman, Mori), are all
attempts in some sense to revisit the past without innocence, that is
with the knowledge of how the past is always already mediated, and
how conventional form and structure can at times gloss over the
problematics involved in writing on the past.
This awareness of the problems involved comes to the fore in the
autobiographers' treatment of memory. Marita Sturken claims:
An understanding of the importance of biography in

postmodernism must acknowledge that the 'truth' of
biographical stories is as evasive as memory, but their
shifting meaning in contemporary social formations is
crucial. There is no original in memory, only its trace, its
narrative. To think of memory in the context of
postmodernism, we need to acknowledge that memory is
claimed and produced in new forms and technologies -
sometimes it may even be disguised as forgetting.14
This, as I demonstrated in the first chapter, is characteristic of the

treatment of memory, forgetting, and writing in the autobiographies I
13 Gerhard Hoffmann, 'The Absurd and its Forms of Reduction in

Postmodern American Fiction', in Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe
Fokkema and Hans Bertens (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin,
1986), pp. 185-210, p. 186.
14 Marita Sturken, 'Personal Stories and National Meanings: Memory,
Reenactment and the Image', in The Seductions of Biography, pp. 31-41, p.
41.
270 Borderlines
discussed, although I would not go as far as Paul Jay when he claims

that: 'the autobiographical work has come to be based on conscious
forgetting rather than on careful remembering and on fictional re-
presentation rather than on historical presentation.'15 Conscious
forgetting and fictional re-presentation certainly play a part in recent
life-writing, but this constantly interacts with careful remembering
and historical presentation, rather than replacing it.
The lack of finality and authority in autobiography, that I discussed
in the second chapter, echoes postmodernism's suspicion of finality
and closure. In acknowledging that their stories could have been told
differently (as both Handke and Lessard do), there is implicit a
suspicion of any authority that would claim finality and closure. This
is entirely in keeping with the view that remembering is a continuing
process, that will never be 'completed', displayed by Hellman, Perec,
and Auster, as I discussed in the first chapter.16 However, this does
not lead, in these works, to a complete breakdown of narrative as a
meaning-making process, but rather to a degree of uncertainty, and a
sense of inconclusiveness.
The issues concerning gender and ethnic minorities have a
prominent place in postmodernism. When the authority of the centre is
questioned the margins play an increasingly larger role.
Autobiography is a form that lends itself well to a discussion of these
issues, whether it be to lend validity to a certain perspective (female,
ethnic minority), or to represent a specific experience (repression/
liberation, crossing cultures). In tackling these issues the
autobiographers come across borderlines between factual and fictional
representations of these experiences. They navigate between the
individual and the universal, thus highlighting some problems that
face every autobiographer; how writing on one's past can lead to
15 Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to

Roland Barthes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 36.
16 This can also be linked to postmodernism's suspicion of universals, what
Lyotard has called its refusal to belief in any 'grand rcit'. See Jean-Franois
Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Les
ditions de Minuit, 1979).
personal mythologies and the difficulty inherent in bridging the gap

between the past and the present.
Michael Ondaatje's book on Billy the Kid is a good example of
transgressions of genre. It is a collection of poems and short pieces of
prose, photographs and transcripts of documents - fictional and real -
which tell Billy's life story.17 This is a concerted effort to open up the
boundaries of biography to a more imaginative approach.18 Writing on
another in an autobiography shows us how the genres feed off each
other and how biography can be revitalised when its borders are
transgressed. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid also raises the
questions about the documentary value of photographs that I
discussed in the final chapter. The autobiographer's treatment of
documents and history is clearly an area where the question of
reference becomes prominent.
Paul John Eakin has written extensively on reference in
autobiography. Eakin attempts to answer the question 'why should it
make a difference to me that autobiographies are presumably based in
biographical fact?'19 He explains that this question has been sidelined
in the last twenty years or so in the attempt to establish autobiography
as imaginative writing: 'This shift in perspective from fact to fiction
has been accompanied by the poststructuralist critique of the concept
of the self (autobiography's principal referent) and of the referential
possibilities of language'.20 Eakin sets out to disprove the
poststructuralist presumption that 'an autobiographer's allegiance to
referential truth necessarily entails a series of traditional beliefs about
self, language and literary form'.21 He examines William Maxwell's
So Long, See You Tomorrow to show that 'pursuit of a referential
17 Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed

Poems (London: Picador, 1989).
18 All of Ondaatje's works are in one way or another based on the lives of
real people, as for instance his book about the jazz-player Buddy Bolden,
Coming Through Slaughter (1976).
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 30.
272 Borderlines
aesthetic need not preclude a prominent role for fiction in an

autobiographical text'.22 Eakin's claim is that autobiography is a
creator of both fact and fiction and that this double nature and this
tension in the autobiographers' relationship with experience is an
intrinsic part of the genre. He goes on to examine what kind of
motivation lies behind the pursuit of a referential aesthetic, and
mentions 'discovery' (the search for some form or principle in a life),
'invention' (repetition of events with a difference), and what he claims
to be a deeper motive: 'a desire to assert the distinctiveness and the
continuity of one's subjectivity'.23 One could say that this mirrors to a
large extent how autobiographers use photographs in their works.
Barthes and Ondaatje both search for a photograph that would allow
them to 'discover' their parents. Auster and Perec write on
photographs extensively, 'inventing' the character of their parents.
Examining the use in autobiography of the ultimate referential art,
photography, has therefore thrown light on the role of the referent in
autobiography.
Autobiography makes use of fiction not only on a superficial level
but in its deep structure as well. I do not believe that it becomes
fiction, but contend rather that it 'makes use of' fiction. Fiction in
autobiography can be located in its structure, in the handling of
memory, in self-invention, in structures of experience such as mother-
daughter relationships and crossing cultures, in writing on someone
else and in the use of documents, but as I hope to have shown in this
work, all those elements, that we generally think of as fiction, can also
be used as tools of knowledge and of self-creation. The
autobiographers make use of these features for their own ends: to look
at the past and to form an autobiographical subject. One cannot ever
completely take the fictionality out of autobiography and the often
very inventive strategies of these writers both point to the 'generic'
possibilities of autobiography (fiction is an intrinsic part of this
mode), and reflect the cultural preoccupations of the postmodern era
(as the postmodern era is preoccupied with how we can know the past,
22 Ibid., p. 48.
23 Ibid., p. 52.
what part language plays in our knowledge, and the problematics of a

unified subject).
Postmodern autobiography entails an opening up of the past. By
avoiding chronology, dates and details, it opens a rich field for dealing
creatively with issues such as the self, memory, writing, and gender,
and allows the autobiographers to find their own structure which they
believe can best represent their life and/or their ideas. The
autobiographer interacts with the past, aware of how difficult it is to
recapture it, and therefore uses all that fiction has to offer to let him or
her effectively engage with that past. This means that in these texts
there are retrospective possibilities, alternative lives and therefore
alternative texts, an acknowledgment that this is not the only way the
life could have been written, that there are other probably just as valid
alternatives.
Fictional practices impinge in various ways on autobiographical
writing, such as in its structure, in creating personal mythologies, in
recreating the past, in glossing over or embellishing one memory or
set of memories and giving them, sometimes, an iconic status, at the
expense of other memories. In my view, fiction is not a negative term
in autobiography, it does not diminish autobiography's truth-value, or
the referential aspects of autobiography. Rather, fiction is used in the
texts discussed here as a vehicle for the telling of a life, as a tool for
making memories come alive, and for fashioning some sort of self-
image. When used effectively, successful negotiation between the
autobiographical and fictional strands of life-writing can open up the
past, by acknowledging the impossibility of giving a definitive version
of a life. Thus autobiographers in the last thirty years or so have
tended to produce texts that exist on the borderline between
autobiography and fiction as they attempt to find new ways to
represent the past.
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Garden/Boltanski's Archives of the Dead', in Writing the
Image After Roland Barthes, ed. Jean-Michel Rabat
(Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997) pp. 32-58
Plantinga, Theodore, How Memory Shapes Narratives: A
Philosophical Essay on Redeeming the Past (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen, 1992)
Poirier, Richard, 'Introduction', in Lillian Hellman, Three: An
Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (New York:
Little Brown, 1979), pp. vii-xxv
Bibliography 287
The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion

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Postmodern Genres, ed. Marjorie Perloff (London: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1980)
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and
Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992)
The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical
Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988)
Ray, Sangeeta, 'Memory, Identity, Patriarchy: Porjecting a Past in the
Memoirs of Sara Suleri and Michael Ondaatje', Modern
Fiction Studies 39(1993) 37-58
Ricur, Paul, Temps et rcit, 3 vols (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1983-
1985)
- Time and Narrative, 3 vols, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and
David Pellauer (Chicago, London: University of Chicago
Press, 1984-1988)
- Soi-mme comme un autre (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1990)
Rugg, Linda Haverty, Picturing Ourselves: Photography and
Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)
Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-
1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991)
Rutherford, Anna, 'Introducing the Writers', in Multiple Voices:
Recent Canadian Fiction. ed. Jeanne Delbaere (Sidney:
Dangaroo Press, 1990), pp. 24-41
Sanderson, Richard K., and Rena Sanderson, 'Suicide and Literary
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Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997) 405-436
The Seductions of Biography, eds. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff
(New York: Routledge, 1996)
Sekula, Allan, 'The Body and the Archive', October 39 (Winter 1986)
3-65
Sheringham, Michael, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires.
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- Review of Autobiography and Postmodernism in Biography:
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Shiach, Morag, Hlne Cixous: A Politics of Writing (London:
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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
Smith, Paul, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of
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Smith, Robert, Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge
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Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and
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- On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 1979)
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 'Selves in Hiding', in Women's
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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 112-132
Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje, ed. Sam Solecki
(Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985)
Stanton, Domna C., 'Autogynography - Is the Subject Different?', in
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Domna C. Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
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eds. Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff (New York: Routledge,
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Sturrock, John, The Language of Autobiography: Studies in the First
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and Histories (London: Macmillan Education, 1988)
Thieme, John A., '"Historical Relations": Modes of Discourse in
Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family', in Narrative
Strategies in Canadian Literature: Feminism and
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(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 40-48
Thompson, Becky, and Sangeeta Tyagi, 'Introduction: Storytelling as
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Theory, ed. Ralph Cohen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 19-
44
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(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980)
Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia, 'Immigrant Autobiography: Some
Questions of Definition and Approach', in American
Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) pp. 142-170
Wood, Mary Elene, The Writing on the Wall: Women's Autobiography
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Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One's Own (London: Hogarth Press,
1929)
- 'The Art of Biography', in Collected Essays, vol. 4, ed.
Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), pp. 221-
228
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235
Worthen, John, 'The Necessary Ignorance of a Biographer', in
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Wright, William, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman (London:
Sigdwick and Jackson, 1987)
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(Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania, 1997)
Index
Ackerley, J. R. 7, 10, 196, 197, Broughton, W. S. 103n

199, 202-204, 207, 213 Brown, Maurice F. 14n
Ackroyd, Peter 185 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 221,
Anderson, Linda 100n 241
Antin, Mary 149 Burke, Peter 39, 47
Apter, Emily 175 Burke, Sean 231n
Attridge, Derek 242n Burton, Tim 268
Austen, Jane 156 Butler, Thomas 31
Auster, Paul 7, 8, 19, 11, 13, 14, Buttinger, Muriel Gardiner 21n
16, 17, 25-31, 33, 44, 51,-54, Byatt, A. S. 185
91, 183, 189, 198, 199, 208-
217, 219, 229, 244, 249-255, Cairns, Lucille 117n, 127n, 135,
260, 266, 269, 270, 272 137
Calvino, Italo 191, 192, 197
Barnes, Julian 185, 190n, 256, Cardinal, Marie 7, 8, 9, 98, 101,
268 107-112, 115-120, 122, 125,
Barone, Dennis 26n 127-130, 134-139
Barthes, Roland 7, 10, 228-242, Carr, David 59n
244, 247, 249, 250, 255, 258- Carruthers, Mary 11, 15
260, 267, 268, 272 Chatwin, Bruce 174
Bassnett, Susan 169n Cheever, Susan 199
Beckett, Samuel 93 Chodorow, Nancy 121n, 123
Bell, William 186, 187, 257 Cixous, Hlne 101, 116, 121,
Bellos, David 37 122, 130, 133n
Bellow, Saul 189 Clarke, Graham 236
Benabou, Marcel 247 Clifford, James 177, 178
Benjamin, Walter 77n, 87, 237n, Codrescu, Andrei 75, 148
239, 252n Cohen, Ralph 7n
Benstock, Shari 99n Conrad, Joseph 161
Bergland, Betty 147 Couser, G. Thomas 163n
Berliner, Alan 200, 201, 268 Culler, Johnathan 59n
Billson, Marcus K. 20n
Boelhower, William 142n, 148, De Beauvoir, Simone 129
151, 178n De Man, Paul 3, 225n
Bolton, Richard 228 DeLillo, Don 45
Boswell, James 189 Derrida, Jacques 237n
Brilliant, Richard 226, 227, 233, Diski, Jenny 7, 9, 61, 92-96, 267,
248 269
Brooks, Peter 54, 59, 71, 74, 83, Duchamp, Marcel 252
87, 88n, 89, 95
292 Borderlines
Duras, Marguerite 5, 64, 118n, Halbwachs, Maurice 25, 34, 45,

119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 227, 49, 50
244 Hall, Colette 100, 127n
Handke, Peter 7, 8, 9, 57, 58, 61,
Eagleton, Terry 1n 77-87, 90-92, 96, 183, 193,
Eakin, Paul John 4n, 52, 84, 147, 194, 198, 216, 269, 270
163, 185, 186, 187, 231n, Hellman, Lillian 7, 8, 13, 14, 15n,
237, 271, 272 17-21, 25-27, 32-34, 36, 38,
Eco, Umberto 265 39, 42-45, 47-50, 52-54, 60,
Ellis, David 189, 226 269, 270
Ellroy, James 7, 10, 204-206, 213, Hemingway, Ernest 52
218 Hewitt, Leah D. 5, 121n
Ernaux, Annie 7, 8, 10, 57, 59, Hirsch, Marianne 101n
117n, 118n, 120, 128, 193, Hodgins, Jack 146n
194, 196-198, 211 Hoffman, Eva 7, 9, 141-144, 147-
152, 156, 163-167, 173, 174,
Falk, Doris V. 49n 177-181, 267, 268, 269
Fellini, Frederico 268 Hogan, Rebecca 26n
Felman, Shosana 110n Holmes, Richard 206, 207, 263n
Forster, Margaret 10, 64, 194, Hughes, Ted 187
195, 197-200, 205, 211, 212, Hutcheon, Linda 1n, 86n, 143n,
218 160n, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268
Fowles, John 92
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth 137 Irigaray, Luce 116, 121n, 138
Frame, Janer 7, 8, 9, 97, 98, 101-
108, 110-113, 115-118, 123, Jacobus, Mary 138
125-139, 145, 146, 229, 230 James, Henry 190n
Fraser, Ronald 194, 206 Jameson, Fredric 265
Friday, Nancy 118 Jay, Paul 270
Friedman, Susan Stanford 99n, Jefferson, Ann 3
100n Jelinek, E. C. 99
Johnson, Barbara 97, 116, 121,
Garber, Marjorie 263, 264 187
Gearhart, Suzanne 2 Johnson, Samuel 189
Gellhorn, Martha 21n
Gilmore, Leigh 1n Kermode, Frank 83n, 92, 93, 195
Goldberg, Vicki 250, 251, 254 Kingston, Maxine Hong 118n,
Gosse, Edmund 2n, 196 163n
Grant, Linda 2n Klein, Melanie 121
Gratton, Johnnie 4, 231n, 235, Krell, David F. 15
267 Kristeva, Julia 119n, 121n
Gubergur Bergsson 208 Kuhn, Annette 227
Lawrence, D. H. 170, 171

Index 293
Leduc, Violette 135n 185, 191, 219, 229, 250, 254,

Lee, A. Robert 190n 255-260, 266, 268, 269, 271,
Leiris, Michel 86 272
Lejeune, Philippe 2, 3, 22n, 37,
38 Perec, Georges 7, 8, 10, 11, 13,
Lernout, Geert 160n 15, 21-25, 27, 34-42, 45-47,
Lessard, Suzannah 7, 9, 10, 57, 50, 52-54, 229, 242-250, 260,
58, 61-77, 87-91, 96, 183, 269, 270, 272
202-204, 207, 211-213, 221, Perloff, Marjorie 242n, 264
270 Plantinga, Theodore 41
Lessing, Doris 222, 224, 227 Plath, Sylvia 128
Lott, Tim 2n, 194, 198, 204, 211 Poirier, Richard 42
Lury, Celia 221n, 240n Pratt, Mary Louise 169, 172
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 86n, 270n
Ray, Sangeeta 143n
Mann, Thomas 201n Riceour, Paul 57, 59, 60, 62, 66,
Marcus, Laura 139, 184 67, 69n, 74, 75, 77, 83, 86,
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 201n 87, 91
Martinez, Ursula 268 Rousseau 61, 87
Maxwell, William 271 Rugg, Linda Haverty 223, 225,
May, Henry F. 10, 52, 132n, 194, 250, 252, 259
195, 197, 199, 205, 211, 212, Rushdie, Salman 141, 143, 151,
218 165n, 167, 172, 268
McCarthy, Mary 21n
McCord, Phyllils Frus 185, 187, Sanderson, Rena 198n
218 Sanderson, Richard K. 198n
McCourt, Frank 6, 64 Sarraute, Nathalie 118n, 121n
Miller, D. A. 87n Schweig, Stefan 87
Mitchell, W. J. T. 258 Sekula, Alan 253
Moi, Toril 121, 130 Sheringham, Michael 1n, 3n, 23,
Mori, Kyoko 9, 142, 167-169, 74, 75, 135n, 216
174n, 179, 269 Sherman, Cindy 227
Morrison, Blake 2n Shiach, Morag 101, 123
Showalter, Elaine 117n
Nabokov, Vladimir 91, 151, 190n, Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 87
224-226 Smith, Paul 233
Nadel, Ira Bruce 195, 201, 203, Smith, Robert 5n
215, 218 Smith, Sidonie A. 20n, 98n
Nussbaum, Felicity 99 Sontag, Susan 111, 247, 250, 254,
255
Ondaatje, Christopher 154n, 162 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 98
Ondaatje, Michael 7, 8, 9, 10, Spence, Jo 227
142, 143, 147, 152-162, 168- Stanton, Domna C. 129
172, 174, 176, 179-181, 183, Stendhal 61, 227
294 Borderlines
Sturken, Marita 269

Sturrock, John 4n, 61n
Symons, A. J. A. 207
Tagg, John 223, 226, 239, 259

Thieme, John A. 176n
Thompson, Becky 143n
Tyagi, Sangeeta 143n
White, Hayden 59n, 265n

White, Stanford 58, 62, 63, 65,
67,-72, 74, 89, 204
Wicks, Susan 2n, 198
Wong, Say-Ling Cynthia 148n
Wood, Mary Elene 111, 116
Woolf, Leonard 170
Woolf, Virginia 16n, 31, 124,
129, 207n, 215, 217, 218
Worthen, John 188, 191
Wright, William 21n

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Borderlines

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003

I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for his

Introduction: Autobiography and Fiction 1

1 Memory and the Autobiographical Process

2 The Use of Narrative in Autobiography

3 Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing

4 Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures

5 Biography in Autobiography 183

6 Photographs in Autobiography 221

Conclusion: Postmodernism and Borderlines 263

The field of contemporary life-writing offers many avenues for

1 See for instance Leigh Gilmore's discussion where she sees

postmodernist life-writing. The aim is to see how by demarcating and

4 Suzanne Gearhart has questioned the existence of fixed borders between

to presuppose that there are generic distinctions between

In accordance with this view I specifically examine the relationship

8 See Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement' in The Rhetoric of

The question of fictionality is a constant preoccupation throughout

The non-existence of my life story also makes it necessary

I consider here fictionality to be a necessary part of the

negotiate the borders and boundaries between autobiography and

What surfaces in this paradox is autobiography's slippery

Autobiographical writing clearly invites this kind of confusion and

12 Leah D. Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of

can denote not only conventions in creative writing but also

relationship with postmodern theory.13 The issue of genre has already

13 Ralph Cohen explains why genre theory poses a problem in

another these texts negotiate the borderline between autobiography

The questions I raise in the second chapter on narrative in

of family history. The aim is to see what writing biography through

1. Introduction: Recollection as Investigation

Writing an autobiography involves a dialogue with, in Paul Auster's

3 Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval

theme is how and why we remember, how remembering connects to

4 Maurice F. Brown describes these works as follows: 'In brief, the

2. Writing and Memory: The Presence of the Past

Writing and memory have long been entwined in people's perception

Remembering instigates a peculiar kind of presence. It 'has'

increasingly dictates autobiographical form. Hellman's life-writing turned

Autobiographers often attempt to capture this peculiar kind of

His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Each time

And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play on

Memory has become an almost overwhelming force. It is as if the

8 Auster also mentions memory systems: 'To follow with a detailed

What Hellman describes in these pages is a physical need to

9 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman in Three: An Unfinished Woman,

reader is drawn in by the descriptions of the effects of remembering

This paragraph can also be read as a comment on the text itself -

'Pentimento' was written by what psychoanalysis calls, in

10 Marcus K. Billson and Sidonie A. Smith point out: 'Nowhere, perhaps, is

Having written An Unfinished Woman, Hellman turned, it seems, to

Le rcit d'aventures, ct, a quelque chose de grandiose,

The structure of W ou le souvenir d'enfance is a complex one. Perec

vestige de ce monde. Ceci, plus que toute autre considration, m'a

je n'cris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n'cris pas

To remember can be a call to write; an impetus to erect some kind of

the inevitable failure of [Perec's] attempt to write about [his

la sensation cnesthsique de ce dsquilibre impos par les

This belief that what we remember clearly must be erroneous and

18 Georges Perec, 'Statement of Intent' trans. David Bellos in Review of

Moments of interpretation and analysis of the past are strongly

Recollections which have not been thought about for a long