Performing Autobiography by Jennifer Stephenson

Author:Jennifer Stephenson [Stephenson, Jenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: DRA013000, LIT013000, LIT004080
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Self-Authoring Characters in Recursive Autothanatography: In On It

Death is both promised by autobiography and explicitly excluded from it. As the writing (graphy) of life (bios), autobiography can never be fully synchronous with life itself, being necessarily limited in its scope of apprehension at the beginning of life and at the end. At both these extremes of the thread of life, there arises an inassimilable gap between the temporal position of the autobiographical author and that of herself as autobiographical subject. It is at these terminal points that the primary experience of life slips the grasp of the secondary recording of that experience. In the beginning, the earliest years of life are clouded by infantile amnesia, with reliable long-term memories only emerging between the ages of three and six.1 Sifting the foggy landscape to identify and describe one’s first memory is a potent cliché of the genre.2 Likewise, the documentation of one’s last moment is also elusive. Philippe Lejeune wonders about the last page of the thirty-five-year diary of French poet Jehan Rictus marked by ‘black ink congealed at the bottom of the last page of [his] last notebook. Did he knock over his inkwell as he died? We will never know – the answer is drowned in the shadow of death.’3 This is the problem of death and autobiography. Although one might continue to document one’s life right until the very end, creative synthesis of that end into summary is impossible. One cannot encompass the experience of one’s own death. ‘There can be no phenomenology of death … Death is radically resistant to the order of representation.’4 And yet, in the face of this impossibility, autobiographers persist in attempting to write about death. For the autobiographer engaged in the work of sorting out a life, it is almost impossible to avoid consideration of death as the inevitable end of that life and of that work. Jeremy Tambling suggests that indeed death, rather than life, colours our understanding of selfhood and ‘it might be better if we started with the assumption of death working through the living, and not dissociated, therefore, from our sense of the present.’5 Nancy K. Miller sums up this perspective, asserting that ‘every autobiography … is also an autothanatography.’6

Autothanatography, which replaces ‘bios’ (life) with ‘thanatos’ (death), manifests in two distinct modes, depending on how the topic of death is construed. In one mode, autothanatography traces the time up until death, engaging the subject in the process of dying. As Susanna Egan notes, quoting anthropologist Robert Murphy, ‘the apprehension of mortality is a condition of our consciousness, a first premise of our sense of time, an axiom in our grasp of selfhood, a constant factor in all our plans, and a thread that is woven through the very fabric of our being.’7 Apprehension of mortality, however, becomes acute when the autobiographical subject is terminally ill. Egan’s examples of process-based autothanatography include Christina Middlebrook’s Seeing The Crab: A Memoir of Dying (1996), Eric Michael’s Unbecoming (1997), and Barbara Rosenblum and Sandra Butler’s Cancer in Two Voices (1996).

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