Experience, Materiality and the Rules of Past Writing: Interrogating Reference

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine the relation between history and autobiography in terms of the ‘rules’ and attitudes relating to their production and consumption. Setting these genres and their related genre expectations side by side serves to emphasize the distinctness of forms of referential ‘past writing’ within the overall field of literary expression. At the same time, looking beyond the commonalities and foregrounding the differences between these two arguably archetypal past-oriented genres contributes to a better understanding of specifically ‘historical’ commitments as well as of attempts to transgress those. Centrally, the apparent disjuncture between many theoretical descriptions and the variety of writing and reading expectations and transgressions in play suggests that existing debates could do more to accommodate current sensibilities regarding referential commitments—especially through a more nuanced thinking of ‘experience’ and ‘materiality.’ To supplement this investigation of changing genre conventions, particularly with respect to tacitly held beliefs concerning the nature of documentation and ‘fact,’ I include a brief example from contemporary literary writing, where the same borders are crossed from the opposite direction.

KEYWORDS:

• Referentiality
• reading contract
• experience
• materiality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kalle Pihlainen is editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice and works as a senior research fellow at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, Estonia. A recent book, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past (Routledge, 2017), explores current theory debates and their implications for writing history today. He is active in a number of organisations for the promotion of research in the theory and philosophy of history, including the International Network for Theory of History (INTH), of which he is a co-founder.

ORCID

Kalle Pihlainen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3361-5840

Notes

1 Naturally, I employ the idea of rules loosely, in relation to what I take to be essentially protean genres. At the same time, for purposes of argument, I am forced to treat both ‘history’ and ‘autobiography’ as fairly coherent genre positionings here. With respect to history as a professionalised discourse, this is perhaps less problematic (see, for example, Cohen 1986; Davies 2006); for good introductions to the challenges facing autobiography as a clear or evident genre, see, for example, Anderson (2001) or Smith and Watson (2001). A classic discussion of the rules of autobiography is, of course, also to be found in Bruss (1976), who is careful to emphasize the shifting nature of the genre, while tying it firmly to the differentiation of fact from fiction.

2 Beyond discussion of extra- and paratextual markers, Lejeune’s autobiographical pact in many ways echoes the writer-reader pact that Jean-Paul Sartre postulated as guiding literary communication in What is Literature? (1949), and Sartre’s claims of mutual generosity and trust are clearly useful for thinking about any reading pact; see Pihlainen 2019 for more on this in relation to history writing.

3 I will not attempt any taxonomy of different forms of referential discourse since that seems, to me, an ill-conceived goal. The genres involved are not fixed and permanent and, as in all creative endeavours, apparently established borders are regularly contested; hence attempting firm definitions is a failed exercise from its inception. In this spirit, I will also refrain from taking a stand on whether autobiography or biography, for example, belong to ‘history.’ For present purposes, the term is best reserved for unmistakably historical texts by professional historians, as done by many other participants in the debate too, including Popkin 2005 and Aurell 2016, for instance.

4 For overviews of this state of affairs, see, for example, Donnelly and Norton 2011; Paul 2015. There are many parallels between the two genres in relation to the fact-or-fiction question too, despite the surprisingly isolated and distinct debates that have been had in them. And perhaps this is unavoidable given the basic challenge: just as with history, ‘the traditional version of the problematic of autobiography has’—according to Eakin (1985, 4)—‘focused on the apparently antithetical claims of truth and fiction that are necessarily involved in any attempt to render the materials of a life history in a narrative form.’

5 Within discussions of autobiography specifically, Popkin (2005, 31) affirms this, noting that ‘history itself is not the simple fact-based form of narrative that literary theorists often refer to; the notion that historical texts can never be definitive is now generally accepted by historians themselves.’ Yet, and although the relation of history to literature (as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’) has been discussed endlessly within theory of history since White, this aspect of the utility of history’s perceived ‘reality’ in debates about literature has remained largely unremarked.

6 Yet another position can be found in Paul Ricoeur, for whom autobiography appears to lie somewhere ‘between’ history and fiction, subject, like history, to the constant ‘refiguration’ required of any storied, or ‘narrative’ identification. In his focus on subject identities, however, Ricoeur moves well beyond debates about representation per se, shifting, for instance, fluidly from ‘the literary analysis of autobiography’ to ‘the story of a life’ to ‘life itself’ (Ricoeur 1988, 246).

7 Like many other commentators, Eakin reads poststructuralism, and in particular Derrida, as intending an absurdly textualist position. Against this, in my view, somewhat narrow and overly critical reading, he gestures most presciently, however, to the importance of embodied structures in these debates (Eakin 1992, 181 ff.). In contrast, discussions relating to experience and materiality in history have tended to ignore not only ideas from phenomenology and existentialism but also those from ANT, so-called object-oriented ontology and various new materialisms.

8 In parallel with discussions within theory of history about the ‘narrative’ and ‘metaphorical truth’ conveyed by historical texts (see, for example, White 1999), Smith and Watson (2001, 11) note that autobiographical narratives ‘offer subjective “truth” rather than “fact”.’ This does not, however, mean that goals of being truthful are compromised. And nor is this promise of fidelity lost in either instance by isolated cases of experimentally playful or unreliable author-narrators. As Mathien (2006, 17) makes this case: ‘Even deceitful autobiographers […] depend for the success of their deceit on a mutual expectation by author and reader alike that the reader will regard the author as sincere and as accurate about those matters within the author’s powers of accuracy. If the author could not count on this response, or at least on the likelihood of it, the deceitful strategy would be irrational; if the reader did not acquiesce, the strategy would fail.’ Compare this, too, with Sartre’s view of the pact as necessitating mutual generosity and trust (Sartre 1949).

9 I am well aware that Joan Scott, for one, makes a rather different choice (Scott 1991); this is because she only briefly touches on the issue of what I here call experientiality—that is, the aesthetic experience of readers (and, increasingly, viewers)—and focuses instead on the interpretation and use of lived experience by historians.

10 But it is also a good reminder that readers are all different, coming to texts with quite idiosyncratic interpretive frames and expectations—some being more responsive to the call of the ‘historical’ than others.

11 I have attempted to elaborate on this same desire for the historical real in terms of a ‘phenomenological yearning’ or a ‘desire for the past’ and for reality in referential representations (see Pihlainen 2017a, esp. 22–26).

12 Or, even, its ‘point,’ as Hardcastle for one reads Ryan and, through her, Robert Wilensky; see Hardcastle 2008, 38. As Ryan (1991, 152) is careful to note, of course: ‘Most external points present limited interest for narrative fiction. The pragmatic approach presupposes a concrete speech situation and a personal relationship between speaker and hearer—but this is precisely what is lack­ing in narrative fiction.’

13 Such ‘resistant material’ can, of course, also bring additional meanings to a text in productive ways. Eakin recounts a wonderful example of this (albeit one born from a fictional framing) regarding the reception of an essay by Mary McCarthy: ‘readers were misguided in wondering if details such as the colonel's having hash for lunch were symbolic,’ even though ‘“the colonel had hash because he had hash” in the real-life experi­ence on which the narrative was based’ (Eakin 1985, 18).

14 Obvious examples of forms that have failed to keep such relevance abound even in the literary canon. With regard to history, historians’ (and perhaps also history readers’) resistance to experimentation and border-crossings well exemplifies the possible settling of the genre and explains the criticism they have received from theorists such as Hayden White and Keith Jenkins, for example, for having become irrelevant.

15 Notably, this is not unprecedented: critics employed a parallel logic in reproaching Foucault for portraying The Order of Things as fictional and novelistic and Sartre for making almost identical claims with regard to The Family Idiot, for example.

16 As Saunders explains: ‘It’s also got a supernatural element. So, weirdly, although it’s ostensibly “historical,” it actually feels more like a sci-fi story than anything I’ve ever done before. There’s a heavy element of world-building—figuring out the internal rules of the place and so on’ (Egan and Saunders 2015). While labelling the novel ‘historical fiction’ and ‘magical realism’ at one and the same time might seem to introduce contradictory needs when one thinks of things on an abstract level, this combination is not uncommon today.

17 Indeed, Lincoln seems to be a staple for testing the fact-fiction boundary, from Gore Vidal’s 1984 novel Lincoln to Seth Grahame-Smith’s 2010 Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (or, for that matter, its 2012 film version).

18 This example, alone, should be enough to demonstrate the limited usefulness of rigid formulations and description-based definitions of the rules of various genres.

19 According to Jameson: ‘Genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact’ (Jameson 1981, 106; also cited by Aurell 2015, 263).

20 Saunders’ sentiment compares interestingly with Lukács’ (1962, 196–198) claims concerning the limited artistic potential—indeed the ‘absurdity’—of using ‘archaic language.’

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Estonian Research Council [grant number PUT1150].