The protagonists of both novels encounter this problem as they write their journals: Roquentin as he struggles to tell the whole truth and Revel as he ceaselessly edits his entries so that they are correct according to the most recent reading. What these failures demonstrate is that an autobiography cannot be complete, and it cannot be correct. It can only be a better or worse story.
I like the way Martin Loschnigg expresses the process in "Postclassical Narratology and the Theory of Autobiography": "By structuring contingent experience, narrative enables us to grasp identity as the telos of a coherent story,"(262). At the beginning of the same article, he cites Jerome Bruner as saying, "A self is probably the most impressive work of art we ever produce, surely the most intricate," (Bruner 2003: 14 cited in Loschnigg 255). I love these quotations because they say exactly what I was hoping someone believed about the relationship between narrative and identity, and consequently between autobiography and identity. We tell ourselves the stories of our lives in order to create the sense of an identity. That's why Roquentin accepts his aesthetic solution, and that's why Revel adopts the role of Detective.
Why are these the roles that appeal to these characters? Why does anyone choose to present themselves as one character instead of any other? How do you create the right identity in your story?
Bruner in "Life as Narrative" quotes from Henry James: "Stories happen to people who know how to tell them," (691). What he means by this is that stories, like adventures, don't just happen; they aren't naturally occurring entities. They have to be constructed, and so someone familiar with the structure of a story will have experienced more than someone who is unfamiliar with the process. I was on a trip this past week with a group of students under the direction of a woman who always wanted to hear stories. I'm sure it was really just a way to get the group to open up to her and to each other, but, I think as a result of always hearing stories from her visitors, she herself had an endless supply to tell. I don't think this is because she was older (she only has a few years on me) or because she has more experiences to tell about. I think it's because she's been trained to see her life as a series of stories rather than as a series of unrelated contingent happenings.
This implies that the stories we learn to tell about ourselves are shaped, in large, by the stories we've heard told. This is both comforting, because it ensures the continuation of the story tradition, but it is also frightening, because it implies that our potential identities are extremely limited by the culture of narrative in which we've been raised.
Like Peter Rabinowitz discusses in Before Reading, the texts a reader has learned shape how s/he will read all future texts; we learn to read from reading. It works the same way for telling stories; we learn to tell from example. The choices an individual makes regarding his/her autobiography, then, will be determined by the meta-narratives they've grown up in and what Bruner calls the "canonical life narratives" (which would have been a great term for me to adopt instead of archetypical superimposition) which their literary culture perpetuates (694).
Short of undertaking an in-depth sociological study, that's the best answer I can provide as to why individuals choose to present identities over others. The question of how to create that identity out of the experiences you remember, is another story, which I still won't be able to answer, but which, at least, the characters themselves address.
Revel, very near the end of his journal, after he has come to terms with the loss of Rose an of Ann and is preparing to leave the city of Bleston, remarks about his journaling process:
“Thus each day, evoking other days like
harmonics, transforms the appearance of the past, and while certain periods
come into the light, others, formerly illuminated, tend to grow dim and to lie
silent and unknown until with the passage of time fresh echoes come to awaken
them,” (304).
Revel is notorious for editing his journal entries, so much so that he eventually creates a spiraling pattern of revision, first of entries he has written about a previous day but wrote on the day now in question, then about that entry's subject, recursively until his time in the city runs out and he is forced to leave his journaling task as his train leaves the city. This continual editing process is necessary for him because, as he explains in the quotation, every present moment changes the meaning of the past remembrances. An event remembered on day X cannot mean the same thing on day X^n because new experiences will have changed that event's importance to the rest of the body of remembered experience. This is why autobiography has to be done at a considerable temporal distance if it is to be "representative" of a non-immediate temporal span.
The paradox, then, is between authenticity and coherence. Distance allows coherence, but it also increases the amount we fictionalize events. I'll tell you the story of my day without invoking too many of my canonical life narratives, but don't ask me to tell you my life-story and to avoid the same pitfalls. It's an impossible task. Are we finally more interested in fact or fiction? I, personally, would choose fiction any day, but perhaps the choice is individual. I'd like to know.
Library, Hamilton College, NY - 1 April 2013.
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