Autobiography & the narrative formation of self.

…turning points in a life are provoked not by actualities, but by revisions in the story one has been using to tell about life and self, the most drastic of these being genre changes prompted from within. This leads me to propose, then, that in some important sense, “lives” are texts: texts that are subject to revision, exegesis, reinterpretation, and so on. that is to say, accounted lives are taken by those who account them as texts amenable to alternative interpretation (129).

This idea that lives are texts is one that I really like, and that I think fits in with the overall theme of my thesis quite well. We are increasingly narrating the stories of our lives as written texts, through blogs (and, really, in visual terms: Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, and so many others).

That lives are ‘texts that are subject to revision’ is poignant; it kind of fits in with Anne Helmond‘s notion that online, our identities are in pertpetual beta. Blogs are, really, the perfect space in which to manage these identities: the use of tagging & categories (forms of folksonomy) means that it’s easy to retrace ones steps, so long as one is familiar with the keywords assigned to a particular story (and has used them consistently). Also, one can link (trackback via permalink) to pasts selves… I might be writing today, and remember something I wrote two or three years ago that kind of tells the same story, and I can link to that past story, forming this kind of cohesive, richer (but still not complete) version of the self in doing so.

Accounted lives means also expecting that we will interpret events differently in different situations & under different circumstances. I guess I am thinking here about the kind of stories that we tell to others when something is bothering us… the propensity to overindulge or overemphasise a situation, exaggeration, the withholding of certain information. I will parts of a story out when telling it to particular friends or family members. I will embellish others. The act of telling these stories is important, but the way that we tell them is just as significant, I think. Over time, too, it’s easy to look back on a past account of an event or time that was particularly trying, and view it through much more… balanced? eyes. Balanced? Maybe just through less involved eyes. Less invested.

…I wish to equate “text” in this sense with a conceptually formulated narrative account of what a life has been about (130)

That is to say, that according to Bruner & Weisser, a text can exist in the memory – it does not have to be written down, so long as this narrative account of life is present in some form.

Paul John Eakin published a text in 1985 called Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention that might be worth a look if the library has it. In it, according to Burner & Weisser, he quotes William Maxwell, from his 1980 text (So Long, See You Tomorrow): “In talking about the past, we lie wih every breath we draw” (p.27 in that text; p.131 in this).

I find that idea so sad: that everything we say is a ‘lie’ in some way (though I suppose that depends upon how we interpret the concept of a lie, really. Yes, everything we say is mediated… but if (as discussed by Havelock and Narasimhan in both of their chapters in this text) we need language to make sense… and verbally articulated self is more ‘real’ (they don’t say real – that’s my interpretation) than other, temporal forms, then does that mean that there is never a true self at all? Or at least, that every self, by nature of its being constructed and performed, is a lie?

reference: Bruner, Jerome & Weisser, Susan (1987), ‘The invention of self: autobiography and its forms’. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance [eds.] (1991), Literacy and Orality. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge Unversity Press pp. 129-148

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