Suzanne Bunkers       Helen Buss       Brenda Daly

An Autocritical Conversation:

Reception, Transgressive Writing, Radical Introspection,

and the Practice of Writing “Home”

In keeping with the IABA conference theme, "Autobiography and Changing Identities," our session will focus on autobiographical processes that involve significant displacement or reconstruction of "self." Because all three of us theorize, teach, and write forms of autobiography, our "autocritical" exchange, based on a three-way e-mailed conversation over several months, will take up the ways in which the reception of our autobiographical texts has shaped our own practice as critics and as teachers. In bringing our critical practice to the consideration of our own writing, we begin to contemplate the nature of transgressive writing to understand how a concept of radical introspection can be used in teaching autobiographical texts, and to realize how each of us has been motivated by a concept of "home" as a writing practice.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Dear Suzanne and Brenda,
 I have a question for all of us. As you know, I have a curiosity about how writing an autobiographical text changes things for the writer, in terms of their own self identity and in terms of their relationship to individuals and groups in the community. Perhaps we could use Albert E. Stone's comment in his introduction to In Search of Susanna as a touchstone for our responses on this subject. He writes: "Breaking silence has its price, here as elsewhere in women's writings. Indeed, this is a lesson that most autobiographers ultimately learn: curiosity and joy often prove inseparable from shock, disillusionment, and depression" (xi). 

--Yours in collaborative writing, Helen

 
Dear Helen and Suzanne,
Given the topic of Authoring a Life, the trauma of father-daughter incest and its implications for the study and teaching of literature,  I have been pleased that the book has elicited responses from a much broader audience than anticipated.  In addition to positive responses from survivors, family and friends, academics from a range of disciplines have told me they are using Authoring a Life  in courses such as a sociology graduate seminar on “Violence Against Children,” an English education seminar on pedagogy, and in life writing courses.  Most recently a man who works in a chemical dependency treatment center in Brazil, where he says incest is “rampant” among women patients, wrote to tell me that he found the book “confrontive, and appropriately so, but not strident.”  As Judith Lewis Herman argues in Trauma and Recovery, this is the kind of affirmative listening that trauma survivors need in order to heal.

As your question suggests, Helen, such responses can affect a writer’s identity. I have, in fact, been monitoring the effects of the book’s reception on my psychic equilibrium, and not only because I am a woman and a survivor.  Although Bella Brodzki argues that "self-definition of identity in relation to significant others is the most pervasive feature of female autobiography" (Life Lines 8), I believe that women are simply more open about the inter-subjective nature of self-identity while men, as Jessica Benjamin argues in The Bonds of Love, tend to deny it.

Because Authoring a Life  draws upon experiences that caused me shame when I was too young to understand that my father's actions, not mine, were shameful, I continue to struggle to maintain my psychic balance.   For example, when one reviewer described the book as “confused” and “narcissistic,” I heard her say, “Shame on you.”  In hear this same “shame on you” in some reviews of Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, but it is Harrison’s minister-father who should bear the shame.  Instead, Harrison is accused of being a bad mother. 

 

But to return to the one negative review of my book:  implicit in the reviewer's charge of “narcissism” and "discussion without boundaries" is a failure to notice or understand that the book deliberately shifts at mid-point from an autobiographical narrative to an analysis of the literature curriculum as it affects women readers, to close with an argument for a change in the curriculum from grade school through graduate school. The reviewer appears to have misperceived this strategy as a confusion of boundaries rather than a deliberate mixing of genres to achieve feminist educational and political goals.

 

To conclude, I have experienced the wide range of emotions Albert E. Stone describes, but my feminist education has enabled me to reflect on my emotions and move beyond them by placing them in a larger socio-political perspective. This broader socio-political-educational perspective also shaped the graduate seminar I taught recently, "Trauma, Memory, Healing and Narrative." 

In short, I am a different, stronger person now.  This change has come about, in large part, because I can imagine a supportive feminist community.  For example, because I have come to "know" you, Suzanne and Helen--at least the selves articulated in your books--I feel part of a "sisterly" community. Yes, your books differ from mine, but I identified with your need to write about your lives, as well as your complicated and artistic writing strategies.  Kathe Pollitt might describe us as "Solipsisters" (35), but reading your autobiographies has actually lifted me out of myself as I seek to imagine your lives, past and present, personal and professional.

--Brenda

Dear Helen and Brenda,
I'm going to begin by responding to the question you raise, Helen. Like you, Brenda, I envisioned a number of audiences for In Search of Susanna as I was getting the final draft ready for publication: 1) family (especially my daughter and my mother), 2) close friends, 3) colleagues and acquaintances, 4) readers of memoir, and 5) writers of memoir. All of these audiences I perceived as potentially "friendly" ones, although I also envisioned potentially disgruntled, decidedly “unfriendly” readers.   As I worked on the stories to be included in the book, I sometimes became a resistant or reluctant writer. In fact, my first draft of the book did not include much information about myself, aside from my two trips to Luxembourg in the early 1980s. Neither did the first draft include much, if any, information about my childhood, college years at Iowa State University,  brief early marriage, graduate school experience at University of Wisconsin or the twenty years since.

 

After reading the first draft of In Search of Susanna, my editor Al Stone wrote me a long letter, urging me to expand the manuscript, to "become more fully confessional," to tell more about myself as a counterpoint to my ancestor Susanna's story. I wrote him a long letter, spelling out in detail the experiences of the past 15 years:  a brief relationship with a man, an unexpected pregnancy, the birth of my daughter, the impact of her father's addictions and rage on our family, my split from him and the effects my daughter, my daughter’s and my six months in Brussels, our return home, then the two-year custody struggle, followed by another three years in and out of courtrooms and social service agencies.

I remember feeling extremely anxious as I wrote that long letter (at least 15-20 handwritten pages) to Al Stone. . . . I thought that my letter would make clear why I could not bring elements of my life into the book. But after Al wrote back, encouraging me to say more, obliquely if necessary, I began to appreciate the possibility of doing so. It would be a challenge to see what I could work into the "story" while at the same time withholding details that might lead to charges of libel and slander.

 

So, Brenda, each time I have read Authoring a Life, I have felt very keenly some measure of what you must have felt (and perhaps still feel) about breaking the silence about incest in your family, about telling the family secret. 

--Suzanne

Dear Suzanne,
I for one am glad that Al Stone persuaded you to include more of yourself in your auto/biography. By examining the issue of so-called "illegitimacy" across continents and decades, you historicize your critique of this cruel concept even as you personalize it with photographs, etc. In addition, because of my personal past, I am able to find points of entry into your book not only because you are a contemporary of mine (though slightly younger) but also because of such issues as immigration, family secrets, shame, and child abuse.

 

Critics of autobio/graphical narratives and/or scholarship frequently fail to understand that this genre or mixed genre has been and continues to be a means for the silenced to speak and to resist social injustice. I have in mind slave narratives, as well as narratives by white women such as ourselves. We are not writing simply to tell our stories, but to change unjust societies. . . .

--Brenda

 

Hi Brenda and Suzanne,
My first idea of how surprising reception can be was from one of the two readers who wrote critiques for the press. This reader was offended by the tone of my direct address to the reader, finding I demeaned my reader by talking down to her. I was flabbergasted. Passages that had made my husband chuckle, because the voice was so close to the ironic, self-deprecating, rabble-rousing feminist he knew, suddenly was condemned as very off-putting.  But what I discovered as I went through each passage of direct address, reading aloud and reading silently in turn, was that my voice comes off differently on paper than in person, where every word is accompanied by mediating tone and gesture. The very passages meant to bring my reader closer were, for this reader who had never met me, demeaning and distancing. It was a great lesson which sent me back to the manuscript to hone the voice and I am very glad now that I got that piece of reception before the book was published.

 

Another pre-publication reception also surprised me. Wanting to give my parents some warning that the book would actually be published, and wanting to assure them that I had taken pains not to offend them unnecessarily, I told them something of its contents. My father was immediately alert to its subtitle A New Found Land Girlhood: "You don't say anything negative about Newfoundlanders, do you?" he asked. The discussion that followed reminded me that Newfoundlanders often suffer from being a national joke in Canada and are very sensitive about their perceived identity. My Dad was more worried that I would say something offensive about Newfoundlanders, than about the family. 

 

After publication, I was surprised by the review my memoir received in The Globe and the Mail. The Globe reviewed it along with a number of "regional" books from various parts of Canada. At first I was merely disappointed that a book that tries to be about the most universal of issues, growing up female in our culture, was lumped in with books about regional history and geography. But in thinking about this with my critic's hat on I realize that for many publications, there are not yet established etiquette’s for reviewing memoirs. With the possible exception of The Women’s Review of Books, where Kate Adams recently offered the succinct definition that memoir is a form that "encapsulates, through the telling of an individual story, a particular moment or era" (8), venues, scholarly and popular, don't seem to know what to do with memoirs. Many times I see reviews of memoirs that are still at the stage of asking questions like "is this self-indulgent" or "is this true" as if the whole project of memoir writing is a suspect activity. At any rate, there is no consensus as yet as to how to read memoirs in any way that is different from reading novels on the one hand or history on the other.

 

The review itself made a comment that confounded me by saying in a manner that seemed to be meant as praise, that the book "deploys the full range of postmodern tricks and treats." My publisher obviously thought that this was a very positive remark, since these very words were included on the back cover of the second edition of Memoirs From Away. For me this presentation of my work (and of me) is ironic, since I have spent most of my academic career protesting the uncritical glorification of the so-called postmodern. I have found the negative aspects of the deconstructive intentions of postmodernism to be counter-productive, a tearing down for its own sake, without any inclination or belief in the possibility of rebuilding. As a feminist I have found many postmodernist productions ethically lacking and politically naive. And now here I am, received as a postmodern writer, and labeled so by my own book blurb! Perhaps any writing that isn't easily slotted or that seems experimental in some way will receive the postmodern tag. Reception is a tricky thing. I learn from it, but sometimes it gives me pause as well. Right now, I am feeling a bit stalled in other memoir writing I am experimenting with. I need to let the reception of Memoirs From Away filter through me for a while so I can separate the gold from the stuff that just glitters. 

--Helen

 

Dear Brenda and Helen,

I've been thinking about the ways in which "transgressive writing" characterizes all three of our autobiographical works.

Laurel Richardson explains the paradox and power of transgressive writings in this way: "Transgressive writings reinscribe the possibility of 'the plot line,' the story, even as they challenge the format through which the story is told" (180). For Richardson, the issue of an author's presence in the text is a non-issue. She writes, "We are always present in our texts, no matter how we try to suppress ourselves" (12). For Richardson, the true question is, "How do we write ourselves into our texts with intellectual and spiritual integrity?" (7).  This question of integrity is at the heart of our own work as life writers.

It is, of course, an issue linked to that of "good faith"--that nebulous quality generally considered essential to what Philippe Lejeune has defined as the autobiographical pact--the contract or agreement between writer and reader--a concept that Lejeune explores in his discussion of authorship, authority, and their underlying ambiguities (3-30). In my case, making a pact with my readers, ensuring them that I am writing in "good faith," has been and continues to be linked to several critical questions.  How much can and should I tell?  What might be the ethical and legal effects of my breaking silences about transgressive experiences in my life as well as in the lives of my ancestors? How might my understanding that my intended audience includes not only nameless "readers" but also my daughter, my mother, and my siblings inscribe boundaries on what I will (or won't) say as well as how directly or obliquely I will (or won't) say it? Finally, how does the very act of writing require the exploration and potential integration of the many, many "selves" that I have been during my lifetime? 

--Suzanne

Dear Suzanne and Helen,
I want to comment on transgressive writing in terms of Richardson's use of poetry--in place of an interview, a more acceptable genre in sociology. First, although some of my colleagues in English may be critical of (or embarrassed by) my use of the personal in literary studies, I have not been punished for my transgression.  By contrast, because Richardson works in a field that strives to be recognized as "scientific," her use of poetry infuriated many sociologists. Why? Because it threatened their status as a discipline. By contrast, if I write an autocritography, my colleagues can think of me as a "creative” writer rather than as a transgressive academic writer.

 

So, to return to the question: what is the nature of transgressive writing? My answer is that it is a complex mixture of disciplinary status/boundaries which are, in turn, related to genre status/boundaries which are, in turn, related to how one addresses taboo topics such as unwed mothers or father-daughter incest. 

 

The second issue that Suzanne raised, the issue of plots and transgressive plots, is equally complex. As you may recall, I abandoned a narrative structure at midpoint in Authoring a Life, not only because I wanted to argue for curricular and pedagogical change, but also because I wanted to transgress this autobiographical convention. I wanted to dramatize a point: that this was a scholarly/pedagogical book, not another an autopathography.  In short, I was using my personal experience, not to tell a personal story, but to transgress the codes of academic writing so that "experts" would pay attention.  My personal story would benefit no one, least of all women students who had suffered sexual abuse but were trying to succeed in school, if I failed to demonstrate that professionals--ministers, teachers, psychologists, social workers--had colluded with my father in maintaining his authority at the expense of my sister's lives. The backlash against this feminist argument is extremely powerful at the moment; for example, members of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which was organized by and for parents accused of being abusers, are represented by scientists such as Elizabeth Loftus, who is on the FMS Board, to undermine the credibility of women like my sisters and me.  Because, in a psychological experiment, Loftus succeeded in implanting false memories, not of sexual abuse, but of being lost in a shopping mall, she now testifies in court that false memories of abuse are implanted by therapists.  While this may happen in some cases, the work of Loftus is being used to discredit all survivors even as it is being questioned by other scientists for its ethics and validity.  In my view, Loftus is using the status of  supposedly scientific discourse in unethical ways to silence survivors of father-daughter incest.

 

To conclude with Richardson's question, "How do we write ourselves into our texts with intellectual and spiritual integrity?" My answer is that, in addition to the problems of violating the privacy of family and friends, those of us who write autocritography must constantly consider the ethical issue of how/if our writing advances or impedes the cause of social justice. Those of us who employ the personal in our scholarship are charged with failing in this goal; as feminist Dale Bauer phrases it, "Writing about the personal aims to recapture the immediacy of context and to suggest an authoritative experiential stance but.., no surprise here, seems only to reify the personal" (57).  I answer that charge by explaining that my work is not confessional but, rather, testimonial; more specifically, my writing is intended as an act of "radical introspection." Radical introspection, as James Hill defines it, is a use of the personal that challenges individualist constructions of pedagogy and has as its goal "insight toward social justice." Authoring a Life is organized to fulfill both these goals: to give readers, many of them teachers, insights that will enable us to move beyond oppressive curricula and pedagogies. More precisely: if I teach with the assumption that others are "like me" I have failed to engage in radical introspection. Radical introspection requires me to explore my own subjectivity in relationship to the multiple subjectivities of my students. Who am I, I ask, in relationship to my students, an increasingly diverse group? How can I move beyond my own ego in order to genuinely "see" and "hear" them? Paradoxically, in order to achieve this goal, I must know my selves--including my "shadow" selves (those parts of myself I would prefer to repress or project onto an "other")--intimately.  Of course, I do not always succeed at this, but it is an ideal for which I strive.

--Yours in sassy soulopsistic sisterhood, Brenda

Dear Brenda and Helen,
 I like this concept of "radical introspection" as a way to describe what I do in my own work. I share the belief that, as a teacher and writer, I need to be able to move through the personal in order to reach a point at which I can listen reflectively to my students' voices and work with them to write "in good faith." I'm fortunate to be able to teach courses that allow autocritography on the part of students in their writing and classroom reflections (e.g., last fall semester I taught a graduate creative writing workshop on autobiography and memoir, and this past spring semester I taught a Humanities course called "Coming of Age: Gender and Culture," in which personal responses to course materials were integral). Many of my colleagues, however, seem bewildered about the nature of this combination and its workability in the classroom. This bewilderment, which is not hostility, has to do with different frameworks for their own areas of teaching specialization as well as a lack of familiarity with theory of autobiography, especially as it relates to current critical theories. Because I'm teaching both literature and creative writing, my own work crosses that imaginary boundary line separating literature from creative writing. Of course, even in creative writing, there is an ongoing dispute over whether memoir and autobiography actually "count" as "creative nonfiction" as well as whether "creative nonfiction" can be considered real "creative writing"! I agree with what you say, Brenda, about "transgressive writing" as "a complex mixture of disciplinary status/boundaries which are, in turn, related to genre status/boundaries which are, in turn, related to how one addresses taboo topics such as unwed mothers or father-daughter incest."  Laurel Richardson may well have been able to publish Fields of Play (which collects a number of her earlier essays and conference presentations) because she is "beyond the pale" in her own field. She has "transgressed" so far that I'm guessing her book is read far more often by folks like us than by those in her "home" (or former "home") discipline.

--Warmly, Suzanne

Dear Soulopsistic Sisters,
I'd like to take up the generic implications of Richardson's use of the format of the poem to address a sociological issue. Most interesting for me, given my current work on how contemporary memoir is developing formats to allow for transgression of old boundaries, is how each of us transgresses generic boundaries. A couple of my students in a graduate seminar on autocritical writing were reporting on Brenda's book, Authoring a Life. They could not understand why your book became less autobiographical as it went on, Brenda, despite the fact that that they were in a class studying not autobiography, but autocritography. They yearned for more of your life, your sisters lives. I found this an excellent occasion to talk to them about generic expectation, and the differences between a traditional autobiography and an autocritical use of autobiographical materials. I think they understood my point intellectually, but they still yearned, because you had "transgressed" their genre assumptions about texts with autobiographical content. I think how we name things has an important connection with what we expect from them. Albert Stone makes an interesting move when he points to the religious content of your work Suzanne, the way Suzanne "dares to point to Mary as model" for the lives of single mothers, thus putting In Search of Suzanna  into the category of religious "apology" or apologia, "a defense of difference and devotion" (xii). He puts this book from a single mother in the category of the great religious apologists, such as Cardinal Newman.

This is a nice turn and would seem to be a compliment, but it is akin to calling my memoir postmodern: the naming elevates the text without really touching its true generic transgression. Suzanne, I think the generic transgression of your text is in the way in which it uses an extended memoir to write autocritically about the scholarly life as integral with female and personal life, especially maternal life. In fact, I would go so far as to say that writing as a mother is, in our culture, a transgressive act in itself. Yours is not a project of one moment, when a scholar might turn her expertise to her own life, because one's own experience is coincidentally reflective of what everyone’s research is about. Rather, yours insists on all aspects of private and public life as a whole: child care, family visits, archival research, reading, academic detective work, family crises etc. No wonder it felt transgressive when you were doing it.

I would add here that such transgressions are highly dependent on  selectivity, since that is exactly the way we negotiate transgression; all three of us know that when you are breaking the rules, you must choose exactly the right details that makes the transgression work for the reader, but also for ourselves and the ethical considerations we have to take into account in regard to people we represent in our texts who may become our readers.

I like to think that Memoirs From Away goes beyond deconstructive norms and initiates an ethically constructive norm, constructing new ways of being through combining narrative, personal essay, fictive technique and argument. Collegial reaction will help me explain what I'm getting at. One colleague, who has a background in life writing, tells me she is reading the book very slowly because there is so much more going on than the surface makes obvious.  Bless her!  I like to think that she is taking the time to appreciate how the text's use of episodic structure transgresses the dichotomy that postmodernism falls into of privileging non-linear narrative over linear. I try to yoke linear and non-linear narratives so that the text can progress both chronologically and topically at the same time. Perhaps, because she knows all about identity models, she will note that this "memoir" is also a theoretical text in that it proposes and exemplifies the spiral as a mobile representation of identity that avoids the static spatial metaphor of interiority/exteriority. Perhaps she is reading slowly so she can discover how the text moves between private and public as if those two categories do not exist and how in its various narrations the individual chapters become more "public" in their location of causal factors as the text moves from early to later childhood. Maybe she sees the transgression involved in my revision of the Victorian direct address to the reader in my "dear reader" strategy.  I'm insisting on my right to make direct appeals and ethical statements in a way that has not been popular since the modernist "show not tell" dictum. If she also notices that my "in your face" feminist narrator transgresses our current habits of disguising our feminist commitments in a time of backlash, then she would certainly be my ideal reader.

Yet, another colleague, not a teacher of literature, commented that her students had read my text, but found nothing to discuss, since no new feminist issues or content were brought up. Transgression at the level of form, style, genre, can have as serious an implication as transgressions at the level of content, but ironically can "pass" the ordinary transgressive content tests, especially if they are given respectable tags like "confession," "apologia," "postmodern." We who work in women's life writing need to find more precise descriptors that point to the transgressive in style as well as content.

One more thought on transgression. I think one important transgression we are making in our collaboration is our play on the word "solipsism." If instead of using the word solipsism as a slur, we view it as a respectable school of philosophy in which knowledge can only be completely gained through a process of personal experience, we are radically transgressing the western tradition that says that there is objective knowledge and it is the only knowledge worth having. If we insist, as the "soulopsistic sisters," that the object of knowledge is only fully known when it becomes subject of knowledge, then that's an epistemological transgression that makes all our other transgressions meaningful.

--Yours, Helen

Dear Helen and Brenda,
Each of us, in own way, has transgressed traditional form, style, and content in our writing (and are continuing to do it now, using this potentially subversive and transgressive form, e-mail). I wonder whether we can assess degrees of transgression and, if so, whether doing so would be worth our while or whether it would simply be another "postmodern turn" (some of which I appreciate, some of which I don't).  I'm also curious about the origins of the English word "transgression." Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary  offers these multiple meanings of the verb, "to transgress": [past participle of "transgredi," meaning to step beyond or across [trans + gradi to step--more at grade]. vt 1 to go beyond limits set or prescribed by: violate [~the divine law] 2 to pass beyond or go over (a limit of boundary) ~vi 1 to violate a command or law: sin 2: to go beyond a boundary or limit (p. 940). The word came into English from the Latin [transgressus] via the French [transgresser]. I wonder whether the movement from Latin into French shifted the meaning away from "stepping beyond or across" and toward the "violation" or "sin"? Casell's French Dictionary offers the synonymous verb, "enfriendre," meaning "to infringe, to break, to violate" (p. 135).

We could look at what we (and others) are trying to do with autocritical writing, not as a particularly "postmodern" phenomenon but as something quite post-postmodern--with our writing representing a stepping beyond and/or across rather than as a violation and/or sin? 

--Suzanne

Dear Brenda and Suzanne,
Granting my need for postmodern stylistics in my writing, yet given my reservations about how postmodernism is limited to deconstructive as opposed to constructive critique, I am concerned with my ability to construct agency inside a "postmodern" context. How can our texts invoke, involve, enact, and move toward agency, for us and our readers? What features, within and beyond, make them capable of agency? 

--Helen

Dear Helen and Suzanne,
This issue is also important to the conference theme of changing identities. I have wanted to claim the term postmodernist for feminists, wrenching it away from the apolitical aesthetes who have declared the Death of the Subject. In fact, in my book on Joyce Carol Oates, I quote Linda Hutcheon's The Politics of Postmodernism: "Postmodernism manipulates, but does not transform signification; it disperses but does not (re)construct the structures of subjectivity. Feminisms must" (168). How can this be done? According to Teresa Ebert, if we distinguish between "ludic" and "resistance" postmodernism, it may be possible to "reunderstand it in more social and political terms" (886). Ebert asks: if we view the word/text as an arena for social struggle, as Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, is it possible to "build a tranformative politics on a postmodern difference that throws out certainty and destabilizes identity?" (892). I think it is possible. In fact, I see Oates as participating in a collective effort--especially in her postmodern novels--to redefine identity in communal terms. In "Feminist Fiction and the Postmodern Challenge" Bonnie Zimmerman identifies this effort as "central to feminism." She says,"Central to feminism is the definition of a communal, not just individual, self: the connnection of one woman to her mothers or foremothers, her sisters, her historical or literary role models" (178). It seems to me that all three of us--though using different writerly strategies--are seeking to redefine the self in inter-subjective terms, terms that are not exclusively familial, but also historical and ideological.  (Note:  after reading Susanna Egan’s book, Mirror Talk, which has taught me a new approach to the study of contemporary autobiography, I question the above approach to postmodernism and autobiography.  Suzanne, your notion of “post-postmodern” strikes me as amore accurate description of what Egan describes as the effect of “crises” on the mixed-genre forms of contemporary autobiographies.)

 

But to shift to a new question: As I reflect on our different autobiographical projects, it strikes me that all of us have explored our relationships to our mothers, but, while both of your books articulate a strong sense of place, mine does not. Or am I blind to this feature in my own writing?  Perhaps we simply had a different sense of purpose, but somehow the contrast has heightened my awareness of a feeling of homelessness that has haunted me--grieved me?--for much of my life. Your books have inspired me to launch a new autobiographical project, one that I might call, Looking for Home. I believe that my troubled relationship to my mother--whom I associate with place/home--is relevant here, but I'm not sure precisely how. Sometimes, too, I think that reading and writing are, for me, an effort to feel at home in the world, a means to find or create a community .

--Brenda

 

Dear Brenda and Helen,
It seems to me that it depends on whether "place" and “home” are seen as nouns or verbs. If “place” is a verb, then I believe all three of us are trying to "place" our selves in our autobiographical writing. Then, too,"to find one's place" can mean "to situate oneself" as well as "to feel 'at home' someplace; "to put someone/thing in her/his/its place" can mean "to set things in order" as well as "to put down." As a verb, "home" can mean "to go or return home"; it can also mean "to proceed to or toward a source of radiated energy used as a guide and "to return accurately to its home or natal area from a distance" (Webster's 7th, p. 398).

--Suzanne

Dear Brenda and Suzanne,
I would like to respond on the subject of "place" and "home." Yes, Brenda is right in observing that both In Search of Susanna and Memoirs From Away have a definite search for home and a sense of place, while "home" is not evident as a physical place or a search for a geographical space in Authoring a Life. In all the ways that you, Brenda, were excluded from "home" because of incest, your mother's denial, your marriage experience as well as your continuing familial constraints, I think Authoring, when read for "place" and "home" must be read as a search for a virtual space where one is at home. Suzanne's location of the verbal "to place" helps here, since I see that you find a "home" (that is, where one recognizes one's community and is recognized by them) first in the work of Joyce Carol Oates. This is indicated by your need to call Oates "friend," and your interest in the ways in which Oates’s art has been dismissed or underrated because of its subject matter, a dismissal that you have certainly experienced as well. I think you do place yourself, establish a "home" for yourself, in the virtual space of "literary studies" which you highlight in your book’s subtitle. The proof of this is the fact that you are secure enough in your home space to place the challenge of a student's detailed critique of the same text you are working on, side-by-side with your own, when you join Laura Armstrong Randolph's analysis of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres with your own study of this text in your chapter "The Scarlet Letter I: Incest Narratives in the College Literature Classroom.”  I found this chapter the most innovative in Authoring.

As I write about "place and home" it comes home to me that what you said, Brenda, quoting Hutcheon on feminism and postmodernism, that feminisms unlike postmodernisms must "(re)construct the structures of subjectivity," is exemplified by this innovative dialogic chapter. By making place for a dialogue about an incest narrative with your student you construct that very "communal" sense of a self that "home" must be for a feminist. It is truly a source of what Suzanne calls "radiated energy" in a nominal sense and a radiating activity in verbal terms in the way each of you, student and teacher, is energized by the others' work. If Jeane Perrault is right when she revises Jane Flax’s concept of “core self” to define core as energy rather than space, then the energy of two human subjects sharing discussion space exemplifies their intellectual, dialogic selves.

--Helen

 

Dear Brenda and Helen,

Brenda, your search for "home," to be undertaken in your new autobiographical writing venture, embodies this redefinition of self in relational terms and harkens back to Mary Mason's discussion of "alterity"--the relational--as a central feature of women's autobiography (207-235).  Now, twenty years later, teachers, scholars, writers (ourselves included) have engaged in wide-ranging discussions of whether there is such a thing as "women's" autobiography.  Many recent studies, based on feminist postmodernist poetics that disavow essentialist notions, study borders and boundaries (real and imagined), with an eye toward exploring and mapping what Susan Friedman refers to as "the liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction, interconnection, and exchange" (3). Friedman notes: "Borders enforce silence, miscommunication, misrecognition.  They also invite transgression, dissolution, reconciliation, and mixing" (3). 

Helen, you have commented that Brenda's memoir, "when read for 'place' and 'home' must be read as a search for a virtual space where one is at home."  Indeed, all three of us are "mapping" as we explore the borders in our own  search for that virtual space of safety and comfort.  Yet the discomfort and lack of safety are precisely what provide the impetus for the continued search.

A closely related issue is that of the intersections of the remembering self and the remembered self. Susan Engel's Context Is Everything: The Nature of Memory  explores the "relational question" in the context of psychology of memory. Engel writes: "Most moments of remembering are not done alone in the process of self-understanding or self-contemplation. Many personal recollections that contribute to one's identity unfold in highly motivated and charged situations--where there are other people. You are trying to justify yourself, impress another person, show how you are the same, or different, from others. These situations then end up sharing one's life story as it emerges across time and place. In this way context plays a huge role in determining the self one knows through one's studies about the past" (87).

Engel's theory is borne out in John Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories, which explores his thesis that, "if identity is increasingly understood in relational terms, then it follows that the lives of others are centrally implicated in the telling of any life story" (157). In his final chapter, Eakin begins to explore the ways in which hybrid forms of life writing require theoretical re-examination of such issues as authorship, agency, privacy, and legitimacy.

All three of these recent works mark a refreshing turn away from critical jargon toward interdisciplinarity and accessibility. Given the nature of my own life writing, Friedman's, Engel's, and Eakin's works are proving especially useful in helping me "map" the relational and transgressive work I am doing.

Considering "home" and "place" as verbs permits me to situate my "selves," incorporating the changing, the relational, the contextual into my examination of writing auto/biographically. 

--Suzanne

Dear Helen and Suzanne,
Aha! Now I get it: to find a place, or to feel more at home, is to use transgressive writing to put someone/thing in her/his/its place. This process sounds like a way of claiming "agency" to me. I am thinking, for example, of some of your writing strategies in Memoirs From Away and In Search of Susanna.

For example, one of Helen's postmodern "tricks and treats," as I see it, is her play on place:  "Avalon: Knowing My Place" is a title that voices resistance to the traditional process of "learning one's place" to which girls (boys too, but not in the same way) are subjected in the process of growing up.  Does Helen install and reinforce the traditional in the very act of undermining and subverting it?  Not for me!

But to return to Suzanne's use of "home" and "place" as verbs:  as she says, in this way, she is able "to incorporate the changing, the relational, the contextual" in her examination of writing auto/biographically. This word play strikes me as postmodernist: Suzanne may install and reinforce a romantic construct of "Luxembourg," but only temporarily, because she is actually subverting and undermining this notion by working "diary entries into the narrative of the chapter to indicate how my actual experience of seeing the 'place' for the first time continually was interpolated with my own romanticization of the virtual place 'Luxembourg' and the virtual persona 'Susanna.'" 

--Brenda

Dear Brenda and Suzanne,

Yes, I get it too, Brenda. What I get from our exchange is that the examination of the word "postmodern" through the lens of the transgressions and innovations of "autobiographical practices" may well yield a different "postmodernism," one we can all come home to. I think a few of the essays in the book Autobiography and Postmodernism begin this process, but so far most critical literature on the subject seems to use postmodernism as a lens to examine autobiography, rather than the other way around. We need, like good feminists always do, to turn a body of knowledge on its head and see what new perspectives that yields.

--Helen

Dear Brenda and Helen,

What the three of us are doing, in our own life writing (and, over the past months, as we have crafted and refined this "autocritical conversation") is akin to what Susanna Egan defines as "mirror talk"--that is, writing that begins in "the encounter of two lives in which the biographer is also the autobiographer" and in which the narration becomes dialogic, interactive, and reciprocal" (7). This kind of collaborative work, explains Egan, seems "far less concerned with mimesis, however, than with authenticating the processes of discovery and re-cognition" (7).  In the opening chapter of Mirror Talk, Egan nudges readers away from reliance on any one definition of "autobiography" and toward more inclusive frameworks, "mapping" the landscape of recent theory through "autogynography" (Bree and Stanton),  “auto/biography” (Stanley, Kadar), "autobiographics" (Gilmore), "autography" (Abbott), "biomythography" (Lorde), "autoportrait" (Lionnet), "autopathography" (Couser), and "autothanatography" (Miller) (14-15).

This kind of "mapping" resonates with that performed by James Olney in his most recent work, Memory and Narrative:  The Weave of Life Writing, where he wryly observes, "I have never met a definition of autobiography that I could really like" (xv).  Olney "maps" his own theoretical work over three decades, expressing admiration Count Gian Artico di Porcia’s concept of "periautography," that is, "writing about or around the self." Olney emphasizes that periautography is characterized by its "indefinition and lack of generic rigor, its comfortably loose fit and generous adaptability" (xv).

--Suzanne

CODA:  In this "autocritical conversation," as we have read and responded to one another's life writing, we have been doing some mapping of our own--examining borders, intersections, interstices, and transgressions in our "selves" as writers, teachers, and scholars. Rather than attempt the impossible (that is, to wrap up all the "loose ends," to draw everything together into a neatly tied bundle), we now turn to you to continue the conversation.

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