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Koray Melikoğlu, ed. Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography and
Travel Writing in Contemporary Literature. Proceedings of a
Symposium Entitled “The Theory and Practice of Life-Writing:
Auto/biography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern
Literature.” Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2007. pp. 360.
Life Writing is a compendium of the papers presented at a conference
on life writing held at Haliç University in Istanbul in April 2006. The
University’s Department of American Culture and Literature succeeded in attracting to this symposium a range of life-writing talent
as wide in its expertise as in its geographical base, scholars working
in the U.S., Finland, India, and many, of course, in Turkey. This in
itself makes the proceedings of great interest internationally, for the
conference took a broad approach to life writing and offered an
opportunity for exposure to less familiar work drawn from countries
whose literature may be less well known. Here there are Western
academics writing on Western subjects, many of whom have already
often been subjects of the biographer’s pen. But Henry James,
Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Plath rub shoulders within these covers
with less well known subjects: the Turkish poet Edouard Roditi, the
American sculptor Alexander Calder, and novelists like the
Argentinian Sara Rosenberg, the Greek Dido Sotiriou, and Moris
Farhi, Orhan Pamuk, Sabâ Altinsay, and Alev Tekinay (who writes in
German) from Turkey. This cosmopolitan sweep has made for refreshingly lively and original research and for a highly enjoyable
book. The collection provides a perfect illustration that the theories
of auto/biography are applicable to, and can be discussed in relation
to, and within, any literature in any language.
The first part of the collection concentrates on theories of life
writing, and contains several gems that will, no doubt, be referred to
frequently by future students. Gerald Mulderig, in his paper “Telling
Life Stories: The Rhetorical Form of Biographical Narrative,” strikes
Nigel A. Collett, review of Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography and
Travel Writing in Contemporary Literature. Proceedings of a Symposium
Entitled “The Theory and Practice of Life-Writing: Auto/biography,
Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature,” edited by Koray
Melikoğlu, Journal of Historical Biography 3 (Spring, 2008): 141-146,
www.ucfv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2008. This work is
licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
142 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY
out in a new direction, away from discussion of those old chestnuts—
the tension between fact and fiction in biographical narrative, and the
provisionality and revisability of biographical truth—to offer an
illuminating analysis based upon the persuasiveness of the life stories
that biographers offer their readers. This he labels “authenticity.” He
rests this concept, which assigns the reader an active role in the
biographical process, upon three legs: the way an author establishes
his own trustworthiness—his personal authenticity—with the reader,
who will always spot the writer in the text, howsoever reticently that
writer may appear, and who has to decide whether to believe in the
writer or not; the success of the dominant ideas the author asks the
reader to accept about his subject; and the coherence of the writer’s
re-arrangement of the evidence in forming the shape of the life in
question. Others have touched on these themes—and Mulderig
credits many of them, including Gail Levin, Ralph Rader, Paul
Murray Kendall, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Isobel Grundy, Haydn
White, and Martine Watson Brownley—but this is the first time they
have been pulled together in such a simple, convincing synthesis.
Other papers in this collection are also useful for students of
biographical theory. Rana Tekcan’s “Too Far for Comfort? A Discussion of Narrative Strategies in Biography” focuses upon the differences inherent in writing biography at different removes of time
from the subject: when it is possible to know the subject intimately;
when it is possible to interview those who knew the subject intimately; and when only manuscript sources remain. Tekcan delineates
the implications of each, and working biographers would do well to
understand these implications before taking on a subject. Nazan
Aksoy’s “A Historical Approach to Turkish Women’s Autobiographies” reminds us that autobiographies can both illumine and reflect a national history; as women in Turkey moved from the private
to the public sphere, the form of their autobiographies moved in the
opposite direction, from an early concentration on the public lives of
the leaders of women’s emancipation to the more modern revelations
of their private lives. In her paper on the sub-genre of trauma and
illness narratives, “Reception and Audience in Life Writing and
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Healing,” Wendy Ryden looks at the therapeutic process of life
writing, reminding us that a writer may be motivated by a desire to
understand or even create his or her own self, but may also seek
healing.
The second part of this collection is the longer of the two, and
similarly contains some key research. The papers included here focus
on specific studies and individual biographical subjects. Clare
Brandabur’s “Quest for a Lost Mother: Autobiographical Elements in
Jean Genet’s Un captif amoureux (Prisoner of Love)” provides an
important study of both Genet’s very strange last book and the
factors that impinged upon him in the last few months of his life and
brought him to write it. In “The Brother, the Friend, the Stranger and
I: Uwe Timm’s Biography of a Post-War German Generation,” Jutta
Birmele examines the motivations and writings of another revolutionary consciousness, that of the German writer Uwe Timm, whose
work helps to explain both the wartime generation of the brother he
lost on the eastern front, and his own generation of students involved
in the political unrest of the late sixties. Reflections on the personal
involvement of writer with subject echo some of what Rana Tekcan
says elsewhere in the volume.
Leena Chandorkar, in her paper “The Dancer and the Dance:
A Study of Mrinalini Sarabhai’s Autobiography,” takes the disappointingly unconvincing memoir of that hugely famous Indian dancer
to illustrate the perils of writing a totally subjective life story in
which, by indicating a complete lack of self-awareness, the author
forfeits the authenticity that Gerald Mulderig persuades us is essential. Richard Larschan, in yet another biographical analysis of Sylvia
Plath, reviews Plath’s two autobiographical essays, unusually, from
the point of view of what motivated her to write them. He forgoes
analysis of the deep psychological problems usually seen in her work
in favour of the more prosaic, and probably more convincing, themes
of her need to make money from her writing, and her lively
imaginative powers. Larschan’s ideas neatly reflect the introductory
comments of the collection’s editor, Koray Melikoğlu, who uses the
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portrait of Rembrandt that adorns her book’s cover to float ideas of
commercial need and of the palimpsests that form a self-portrait.
There are some disappointing papers in both sections, as there
always will be in a collection of conference papers. Leman
Giresunlu’s paper on blogging—“A Culture of Everyday Life: Exploring Blogging as Cyber-Autobiography”—examines a new field
that cries out for theorizing, but sadly, it manages only to scratch the
surface of the many fascinating issues that have arisen: the mutability
of the personalities on offer on the web; the shifting nature of blog
text; the direct involvement of the reader in dialogue and contribution; the easy corruptibility of the text, to list but a few. Similarly,
“Auto/biography, Knowledge, and Representation: The Theory and
Practice of Filial Narrative,” by G. Thomas Cousser, touches upon
the sub-genre of writing the lives of parents, but does so only to
categorise rather than analyse. This is a pity indeed, as this is an area
worthy of exploration, given the deep psychological currents running
through this type of life writing—the writings of Edmund Gosse and
J. R. Ackerley spring immediately to mind, but these are only two of
many examples.
The collection as a whole raises some interesting and
contentious points. Travel writing is rightly included, as the title indicates. Manfred Pfister links the physical and psychological journeys
of the traveller in his paper “Travellers and Traces.” Dilek Doltaş
examines Orhan Pamuk’s construction of himself through his evolving experience of his native city in “Resisting Dis/closure: Autobiography and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul.” These two short contributions
help to show that the study of travel writing is a fruitful field of life
writing research. More contributions of this kind would have been
welcome.
The theorists in the first part of this collection are as unanimous as they could be that a reader’s acceptance of, and pleasure in,
a biographical account is dependant upon factual truth, and Sidonie
Smith’s damning treatment of autobiographical hoaxes, “Say It Isn’t
So: Autobiographical Hoaxes and the Ethics of Life Narratives,”
drives the point home. Yet many of the papers in the second section
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treat fictional works as life writing and make no evident apology for
doing so. Literary criticism so often elides in such a fashion into life
writing, so subtly that it almost escapes notice, but this slippery slope
should be avoided at the outset. Writers’ fictional accounts of their
lives or the lives of others are not life writing. Granted, the
consideration of fictional literature in a scholarly conference is
understandable, given that the focus was a literary one. Yet, if life
writing is to be taken seriously as a subject of study, it needs to show
that it is taking itself sufficiently seriously to set boundaries that
exclude the fictional.
This raises a further point, that among the conference
participants and their papers, there was a noticeable absence of
historians and historical discussion. Life writing is, of its nature, an
interdisciplinary subject that cuts across old academic boundaries,
principally, though by no means exclusively, those of history and
literature. As it combines fact and creative writing, life writing can be
seen to be bridging the chasm that divides the two disciplines. It is
also worth pointing out in this regard that academic historians have
long wrestled with the problems that vex life writers: the
impermanence of historical analysis; the need for “authenticity”
(particularly in its requirement for the construction of a historical
view coherent enough to account for all the evidence and convince
the reader); the management of the “imaginative referent”; all the
creative issues, in fact, that make history an art rather than a science.
Indeed, the study of life writing seems more akin to the study of
history than it does to the study of literature. This will undoubtedly
be seen as a provocative statement by many in the field, but there is
certainly enough truth in it to cast doubt on the practices of
establishing life writing departments, of writing theoretical treatises
on auto/biography, or of organising conferences on life writing,
without including practitioners of history. Or, it has to be said,
without studying lives written by those who are not professional
writers. Literary auto/biography really is a minority sub-genre!
But this is not a criticism aimed at Haliç University alone, or
indeed at this book, which has added much to the growing wealth of
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analysis of life writing. Life Writing is a thought-provoking and insightful collection that will remain a useful work of reference for
some time to come, and is, moreover, an enjoyable volume of papers
that will widen the knowledge of anyone who has the good fortune to
obtain a copy.
Nigel A. Collett
Nigel A. Collett served in the British army for twenty years, retiring
as a Lieutenant Colonel. He completed an M.A. at the University of
Buckingham’s Biography program, which embraces both History and
Literature. He is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: General
Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon and London, 2005) and is
managing director of the Gurkha International Group. Collett is
currently writing a life of the Hong Kong superstar, Leslie Cheung.