Reading for Excess: Relational Autobiography, Affect and Popular Culture in Tarnation

Abstract

In this article I will examine a limit point in current methods of reading in autobiography studies, using Jonathan Caouette's 2003 autobiographical film Tarnation as a case study. Reading a powerful and deeply ambiguous key scene from the film, I investigate the limits of a narrative-based approach to multi-modal auto/biographical texts. Drawing on contemporary documentary studies, affect and autobiography theory, I propose that the rise of autobiographical acts which use multiple media presents autobiography scholars with the opportunity to diversify our methods of reading to include attention to the communication and representation of the historical, social and semiotic conditions of identity and selfhood which exceed narrative representation. I examine Caouette's use of collage to bring together home-made footage and footage from popular culture as telling a relational narrative: the story of the video camera, and the opportunities it provides to make film and television texts in the home as a technology of the self which influenced Jonathan's development as deeply as his familial relations.

Keywords:

• autobiography
• affect
• Tarnation
• home movies
• popular culture

Notes

1. Harris proposes a slightly different reading, suggesting that Jonathan enacts and embodies his mother's trauma of mental illness and shock treatments in an attempt to bear witness to it (8–10).

2. The importance of considering the availability of technologies in the spread of life narrative practices is powerfully demonstrated in Lejeune's On Diary, which tracks the development of the calendar, the mass production of paper and writing implements as the necessary conditions for diary-keeping.

3. See also Rosalind Krauss's discussion of ‘the aesthetics of narcissism’ for how video creates specific models of self-reflection in early video art.

4. The other is an extended, and unedited, sequence of his mother singing to a small pumpkin at the end of the film; in the commentary on this scene, Caouette discusses cinema vérité in more detail.