April 8-10, Post 19

Methodology

I met with my beloved advisor, NSR, on Thursday 4/4 to talk about the "draft" of my thesis I'd completed (i.e., posts 1-16) and "whether I was Roquentin or Revel," meaning whether or not I would do edits, and, if so, how. Editing is typically the next step in the thesis process, however, because of the form I chose and because I don't want to sacrifice my attempt at authenticity, it was not immediately obvious how I could move forward. We discussed using some kind of hypertext so that I could make revisions, but keep the original text largely as-is.

This whole project has been a foray into the unknown for me in terms of technology and social media, and my experience in this matter has been no different. I got a few suggestions on how to actually use hypertext from a fellow Comparative Literature (and Physics) major who graduated last year, and from there I've had a lot of fun contributing to the entropy of the internet.

After some largely unfruitful work with ThinkLink (which did, however, allow me to post my bibliography as an icon in the blog's banner image), I eventually settled on creating a website to which I would link my comments, like an endnotes section, just on a different webpage instead of a different physical one. I also have been able to sneak a few non-edit-related links in, so I hope you've enjoyed coming across those, if you've visited my first posts recently.

This is all still a work in progress, so I expect something in this methodology will change before all is said and done, but for now, it seems like I've established a pattern that will support the editing requirements of my blog relatively well. I do say only "relatively" well, because I can't make myself track the changes I've made to correct typos and other silly errors that NSR caught which had originally escaped me. (I don't know if is more-so for reasons of simplicity or vanity, but I'm not keen to figure it out.) The other problem is that I'm rewriting a few sections, but they are obviously written from a different vantage point, coming from the "end" of the drafting process rather than in the beginning or even the pre-drafting stage, so I'm not sure if I ought to take on the persona of Emily-writing-March-10 or if I ought to write from the present. I'm leaning toward the former, though I have my methodological concerns about that. It seems to be the logical way to edit, though - otherwise, I'd end up with an obviously different project each time I went through to do corrections (not even content-related edits), which, though not unimaginable for me, is unacceptable given the graduation-imposed timeline.

I originally wanted to include text in the original posts that would appear as a reader hovered over a part of the text with their cursor, that way I could reduce the distance between the original material and the changes I was making in the "second draft," but I can't figure out how to do that. However, it's recently occurred to me that this hypertext form fits the content of the project much better than a linear one would, since its scattered pieces reflect the dissemination of meaning with which these texts variously struggle.

KJ Study Room, Hamilton College, NY - 14 April 2013. 

April 7, 11-12, 14, Post 18

While I was writing my first post on Bakhtin, I came across several short points I wanted to make that didn't really form any kind of readily apparent cohesive unit, so I thought I would leave the overly-long post as it was and discuss those points in separate posts. In this one, I'd like to look at what Bakhtin calls the "problem of historical inversion," (147).

This was an interesting find for me, theoretically, because it is similar to the idea about the forward/backward nature of autographical living that I've been trying to work out. On first glance, I even imagined that this was precisely what Bakhtin meant. However, as I've now looked more closely at the context, I see that it's only an adjacent concept which may, nonetheless, illuminate the "historical inversion" I had hoped it would be.


Bakhtin's Historical Inversion

When Bakhtin uses the term, he means that the normal vision of history has been reversed. The "normal" expectation is that events which have not yet happened in the present must occur in the future, if they are to occur at all; the past is complete, so all new events must necessarily occur in the future. However, in historical inversion, one sees the future as limited instead of the past. As Bakhtin explains it:

"The essence of this inversion is found in the fact that mythological and artistic thinking locates such categories as purpose, ideal, justice, perfection, the harmonious condition of man and society and the like in the past ... We might say that a thing that could and in fact must only be realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the past, a thing that is in no sense part of the past's reality, but a thing that is in its essence a purpose, an obligation," (148).

In this mode of thought, the past is valued at the expense of the future. It's a nostalgic vision of time; it assumes that the past contained something uniquely good in it which has since been lost and can never be found again. Whatever future comes can never achieve the grandeur of the golden age that once was.

This devaluation of the future's potential recalls eschatological visions of time which similarly value the past to the detriment of the future. In that understanding of time, the period between the present and some desired end time is devalued, but here there is a light at the end of the tunnel: eschatological expectations await a period of kairos, or of opportune time, (such as the second coming of Jesus Christ in the Christian doctrine) which will eventually arrive and bring about an apocalypse of the barren time.  There is no such recompense for a temporal vision in historical inversion.

This makes it an existentially problematic world-view because it prescribes stagnation, if not decline; it is impossible to progress along any positive axis when the whole of the future is presumed to be less able to welcome success than was a past which never existed. It also presents pragmatic problems because believing that the past contained something ideal which never actually existed makes real positive action impossible, since beginning with unrealistic expectations, whether of what was once possible and therefore ought to be the overall goal for the future, or of predetermined failure or limitations, makes progress unlikely. This world view, then, instead of truly announcing a fact of the world, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those believing in the future's inherent want will create a wanting future.

I don't mean to suggest that this is the only system in which the subscribers act based on false ideals. I don't know that it's even possible to not act in this way. I merely mean to point out what might be the important problems of historical inversion, which Bakhtin names as such but does not explicitly describe.

***

Historical inversion and Adventure: creative solutions for authentic living?

How might this conception of historical inversion inform my own conception of autobiography? My interest in the idea is in its its use of the different temporal periods to create the identities of each period; past informs future in historical inversion as it limits its potential, but present also informs past, as it's from present ideals that the supposed past golden era is defined.

In a parallel process, Roquentin creates the idea of adventure. He takes present ideals and creates from them a past which has not really happened. The primary difference in this part of the process, apart from the scale of the expectation (whole cultural eras vs. self-identity in a limited expanse of time) is  the scale of the fictional work done. To create adventure out of experience, Roquentin does not have to do much reevaluation. The experience is there, it only requires a different temporal position from which to see the events in order to go from "experience" to "adventure." In contrast, imbuing the past, as an era, with ideals takes a greater effort, which gives the impression of being a greater fallacy. I would go so far as to say Roquentin's adventure creation process is natural, and perhaps necessary, whereas the process of historical inversion, as it is an inversion of the expected temporal vision, is clearly not a necessary or normal process in today's world.

Besides these these implications of the two processes for the past and present, there is, of course, also the question of how they affect the future. We've already seen how historical inversion proves destructive to the future, assuming that it is indeed a false belief and that there is therefor something to be lost by its belief. I think that, again, the difference in effect is a matter of scale. Does the conception of adventure paralyze Roquentin? Is each adventure a small aesthetic hiatus like the final aesthetic solution is in Ruppert's analysis?

The obvious answer is yes. You have to choose, live or tell, because telling (i.e., creating adventure) requires the cessation of life. This, I believe, is for clear temporal reasons. What interests me is whether or not this activity then proves productive for the self since it helps create an identity on which the individual can rely, or if it only offers temporary existential consolation.

Bakhtin says: "If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making them a mere abstract conglomeration," (146). Adventure-making concretizes past experience so that it can be remembered in the present as a meaningful experience, which allows it to aid in the construction of a self-identity. It therefore performs a necessary function of identity in linking the past to the present.  Bakhtin includes "future" in his temporal context, and adventure-making's utility relies on its ending with the present. Instead of aiding identity, projecting adventure into the future actually proves destructive to choice and is potentially the cause of the never-ending present problem with which I've been struggling throughout this thesis process. 

When adventure-making uses only events from the past to create an event, that event informs the present conception of self because it gives the individual the ability to point to an experience they've had as a precedent for present/future action. However, if the individual instead attempts to define the adventure as beginning in the past and stretching into the future, they come up with unrealistic expectations for how the future will be, since that imagined future is based off of fictional representations. That kind of future will never arrive since, as we've already seen, reality doesn't unwind like fictional plots do; if it did, there would be no need for any kind of aesthetic solution, since life would already have an imposed order. Waiting for these impossible events to occur as the next "plot points"in life paralyzes the individual, making authentic living impossible. 

This demonstrates that adventure-making is a vital part of self-consciousness and identity, but that it must be kept in check; as shown, it is a dangerous tool which allows future action but which can also, if  allowed too great a leash, ruin the individual's potential for action. The creative aesthetic solution is really a useful activity, if kept in the past. It becomes problematic when it bleeds over into the future. I had cast myself in the position of "thesis-writer" at the beginning of this project and could not begin my work because of the fictional expectations I had about what the experience ought to be like. I don't know how to defeat this impulse to fictionalize the whole of the self instead of only the past experiences,. The only way I know to circumnavigate the problem is to begin in any way possible, and to eventually try to work back around to the original goal in such a way that it doesn't realize you're coming for it. But is self-deception really the only solution? 

KJ Treehouse, McEwan Dining hall, Burke Library, KJ Study Room, Hamilton College, NY - 14 April 2013.

April 6, 10-11, Post 17

So much for a final post.
I'm doing another thesis - a "mini-thèse," as the department calls it - to fulfill my French major, and, as all my projects seem to circle around the same 4 or 5 major themes, the research I'm doing for that project seems to be as pertinent if not more so to this first project than to the one I'm actually trying to start now.

I've had trouble choosing a focus for the French project which, according to my Comp. Lit. friends, should not have come as a surprise to me; indecision has apparently been a long-present theme in my academic career. I've chosen three book (which I'd like to call novels except that Patrick Modiano makes that difficult), but I've been waffling back and forth between looking at the effects of place on identity and looking at how these three books deny generic classification and why that is important. When I started this post, I thought it would be the first project for sure, but now I'm leaning more toward the latter.

I’m frankly unwilling to choose between the two topics because I want my work to answer questions I myself have, not only to help me explain an idea I've already got in mind; I want to discover something over the course of my project, not just figure out how to best convince others that my position on something is the correct one. It seems a shame to have to pass over interesting connections that might lead to more interesting conclusions just because it's not certain that the connections are there to be made; I don't want to have to pass over questions of genre if I choose to look at place and identity simply because an inquiry into auto-fiction and the modern/postmodern detective novel would have to be either incomplete or would end up being a much larger project than the department has in mind. 

As this blog project has so conclusively demonstrated for me, the expository form is not conducive to productive thought; it is an effective tool for communication, but it necessarily restricts the richness of thought that is being communicated. Having been conditioned to produce expository work, I wonder how many connections I've missed over the course of my academic career - over the past year alone - that I could have found fascinating if I'd been able to think of my project in a less linear way. Theoretically, I could do all of this web-work and then stream-line into expository essays, but I think that, in most cases, the work would result in several essays and I'm afraid (and I don't mean that euphemistically - I really am afraid) that I don't have the energy for that level of commitment to this French project. I have (very) limited time, so the work I do needs to be pre-focused on the material that I will prove visibly useful in the written product.

I've started studying Bakhtin's essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" from The Dialogic Imagination, and I can't help but think of the text first terms of this project and only in terms of my French work as an afterthought. I'm hoping that, if I discuss Bakhtin here, I'll be able to then focus on its applicability to French. Of course, there is also the very real possibility that I’ll do this work, I’ll enjoy the exploration, I’ll learn about Bakhtin in terms of events and autobiography, but will not ultimately save any time by the effort. However, prioritization is not a great strength of mine, and I honestly don’t care whether or not this is the efficient choice because the material seems so applicable to this Comp. Lit. project that it would be academically (intellectually?) irresponsible to ignore. So here we go. 

***

Theory: the chronotope and adventure/biographical time

In this essay, Bakhtin coins the term "chronotope," literally “time space” (84). He explains the word in terms of artistic depictions, especially narrative representations in literature, of time and space, which he sees as inherently interconnected. Existence occurs in four planes, the first three being concerned with place, and the fourth being itself time, so a study of one is naturally also a study of the other. He idea of chronotopes offers a way of understanding how space/time is conceptualized in fiction during different historical periods, which sheds light on both the socio-political atmosphere of the time and on categorical questions of genre. Consequently, understanding how to recognize various chronotopes ought to give me a way to analyze the genres of literary works, either by identifying prevalent chronotopes or by recognizing how the works diverge from the expected treatments of space-time, though I am, of course, wary of using a post-structuralist theory as an organizing concept in my own work.

Furthermore, though Bakhtin discusses them primarily in fiction, he famously recognizes in his concluding remarks that “Every entry into the sphere of meanings is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope,” (258). Though this is an old theory (it goes back, as Bakhtin notes, to Kant in his “Transcendental Aesthetics”), it’s important to this investigation because it extends the realm of chronotopic significance beyond the artistic oeuvre and into the worlds of the author and reader. Since all conscious experience is registered through an organizing filter, all conscious perception is the result of fictionalization. For my project, this means that chronotopes apply not only to fiction, but also to autobiography and the self-conceived identity.

The first section of his essay is concerned with analyses of the three ancient novelistic forms he recognizes: the Greek Romance, or the Novel of Ordeal, the Adventure Novel of Everyday Life, and the Ancient Biography and Autobiography. He then goes on to identify and explain several figures that create important chronotopes, like the Road and the Fool. Finally, he undertakes an analysis of the Rabalaisian chronotope before making his closing remarks, in which he revisits the major chronotopes of the road and threshold and expands the concept of the chronotope beyond the world of the novel to that of all perception.

The first kind of ancient novel, the Greek Romance, presents a static view of the individual by representing the story as two biographical poles with extra-temporal "adventure-time" between them. Though he does not explain biographical time in this essay, given its usage, I image that  it corresponds with time as we experience it when under no unusual duress, and is a kind of time that leaves a trace on the individual (90). Adventure-time, in contrast, is "highly intensified but undifferentiated,"(90). This particular genre involves a chronotope that depicts adventure as the hiatus between real life experience in which the characters travel widely and overcome many obstacles, but are ultimately unchanged by the events they’ve experienced. They meet and fall in love, and biographical time stops until they are married; everything between these two plot points is interchangeable.

The second ancient story archetype, which he provisionally titles the "adventure novel of everyday life" is marked the "mix of adventure-time with every day time," (111), and by the presence of individual agency at the expense of a diminishment in the power of fate, though he notes that agency is still limited to the individual who has no illusions of creating change in the wider world; there is still a lack of heterogeneity in the presented world (119).

As opposed to the first kind of ancient story, the ancient romance, this genre's most prevalent chronotope allows the hero to undergo an important change because of the events that happen to him in the story. (I do say "him," here, because Bakhtin doesn't identify any female heroes in this genre). The identity of the character, then, is at stake, though I don't believe this early novel includes meta-diegetic awareness. (By this I mean that the character whose identity changes would not reflect on the change he undergoes. To my knowledge, that realization is unique to 20th and 21st century literature like the novels I've studied in this blog.) This is an important distinction to make because it separates the ancient Greek "adventure in everyday life" chronotope from its derivative contemporary narratives, the pedigree of which I will now discuss.

In this kind of novel, "Time is not merely technical, not a mere distribution of days, hours, moments that are reversible, transposable, unlimited internally, along a straight line; here the temporal sequence is an integrated and irreversible whole," (119). It is irreversible because, in contrast to the Greek Romance, this genre's definitive chronotope allows the past causal power on the present/future. 

This introduction of temporal causality means that time in this novel is necessarily different from that of the Greek romance. Biographical time in this second genre is allowed a role instead of being relegated to the two poles of the story between which all the adventure takes place. However, these kinds of novels still cover a vast period of diegetic time. The typical solution to this conflict between the confines of the novel form and the time represented is to choose pivotal events and to explain those in biographical time, which, nonetheless, occupies what Bakhtin calls the vertical axis while the story’s arc (guilt --> punishment --> redemption --> blessedness) moves the story along horizontally.  (I say typically because, as Bakhtin notes, Tolstoy generally refuses disturb biographical time, preferring instead to allow his characters to come to slow conclusions than to introduce “suddenly” adventure-time logic to his novels. See 249.)

Though the biographical time is represented only in fragments, presenting several static pictures of the hero that are separated and explained by interspersed periods of crisis, it’s not an adventure-time logic that prevails, but rather a moralistic one. In Bakhtin’s example of The Golden Ass, Lucius really is guilty, and its his own actions that motivate the story’s motion, not the unpredictable intervention of the gods or fate; this means that the individual has gained agency in this genre which he lacked in the previously discussed one.

This power to influence the character of the hero reflects a shift in the purpose of the novel. Bakhtin calls the Greek Romance a “novel of ordeal” because it presents the hero with a test or trial, which he must then overcome while maintaining his sense of integrity. This genre offers the reader an existential reassurance that the self remains the same across tribulation. In contrast, the adventure in everyday life novel focuses on metamorphosis of character, showing “how an individual becomes other than what he was,” (115). This novel offers no existential consolation, but, instead, allows the character agency to affect his own life. This development is important for the history of the novel, as it's in part because of this second kind of work that others such as Nausea, which grant the protagonist too much freedom from fate, have been able to develop; there is no crisis of choice if there is no choice, so this development in the novel allowed for existential exploration to occur in the form.

***

Roquentin’s problem of adventure: an infelicitous aesthetic solution in itself

I’ve focused on this genre of the ancient novel because I believe that the mix of adventure and biographical time helps explain Roquentin's conception of adventure/events and suggests a new reason behind his inability to decide whether or not he has experienced any.

The explanation Bakhtin gives of the biographical/adventure time dichotomy in this genre gives me insight into the problem Roquentin experiences in recounting his experiences. As I've discussed before, he believes that one has to choose to either live life or to tell it; one cannot do both. This means that up-to-the-moment self-consciousness is impossible; the comprehension of self will always be retarded by the continuation of experience and the necessity to conceptualize events lived before they can be understood as part of that self’s experience. Roquentin recounts several instances where he feels that he is having an adventure, only to lose the sensation as soon as he realizes what he's feeling.

Is it possible that he’s attempting to cast himself as protagonist of an adventure-time narrative? Since adventure-time disallows the individual to change, it disallows him live in the real world;  conceptualizing himself in terms of an adventure-time narrative would effectively rob Roquentin of his ability to act. As adventure-time is a purely fictional construct which cannot exist in the real world, attempting to overlay that chronotope on life would result in the collapse of self consciousness. If this is in fact the case, this constitutes a mimetic aesthetic solution like we have already witnessed in Revel's case which, as in Passing Time, proves destructive to the individual.

***

Chronotopic Non-identity: fiction to reality

Though this essay is full of interesting thoughts, I’ll skip from here to the end because it’s Bakhtin’s discussion of adventure-time in contrast to biographical time, which I’ve already touched on, and his extension of chronotopic importance to the real world, which he undertakes in the Concluding Remarks ,that interest me most in terms of this project.

Until this section of the essay, which was written in 1973, a full 35 years after the rest of the text, it wasn’t clear to me exactly where one chronotope might end and where another would begin. Bakhtin responds here to this concern by explaining that chronotopes are “mutually inclusive” (252); the chronotope of meeting, for example, often is evoked by the chronotope of the road. This creates a dialogue between all representations, which is, in turn, filtered through the chronotopic world of the reader. The answer to my question is then that chronotopes are not rigid categories into which to sort material, but multiplicitous clues to the relationship of art to the experienced world.

Beyond offering that precision, this last section of the essay underlines one of the primary probems the protagonists of Nausea and Passing Time encounter. As Bakhtin poetically puts it:

“It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own ‘I,’ and that ‘I’ that is the subject of my stories as it is to life myself up by my own hair. The represented world, however realistic and truthful, can never be chronotopically identical with the real world it represents where the author and creator of the literary work is to be found,” (256).

In light of this quotation, it seems that the protagonists of my chosen novels struggle to rectify their lived chronotopes with those they are writing, Revel more so than Roquentin; it is Revel who agonizes over his inability to authentically or correctly represent his experiences, while Roquentin seems to have more basic chronotopic problems to at hand, as I’ve mentioned above. Since the two times can never be identical, the attempt at authentic representation is a priori doomed, though, as Revel demonstrates and as I have personally discovered, it often takes a failed attempt at unification to prove this.

Roquentin, though he also demonstrates this truth in the entry where he corrects the account he has just made of an even so that it includes the nonevent of the newspaper, is more concerned with his lived chronotope by itself; he doesn’t understand, for example, how to move from the present into the future, though it’s clear to him that everything changes at every moment, meaning that the world is in fact in temporal and spatial action. I would suggest that this leads him to accept the mimetic aesthetic solution, as discussed above, which causes his unnecessary confusion over “adventures,” which, as we know, cannot bring themselves into being but instead require retrospection for their birth, and which furthermore demonstrably cannot be lived. 

Bakhtin's text is long and covers a large spectrum of material which could all potentially be useful to my investigations. I've already started two or three other posts on individual ideas which didn't fit well into this discussion, so I imagine I'll be writing more on the essay.

Is the concept of completing a project as daunting as that of beginning one? I never thought so, but it may yet prove to be as difficult.

KJ Treehouse, Hamilton College, NY - 11 April 2013.

April 1, Post 16: Final Post

This project began with a novel it took me several years to finish, not because I didn't like it, but because the subject matter struck too close to home for me to read it without feeling personally implicated. I've gone through my college career with Nausea, so it made sense to me that I would do my final project on the book. It's a personal project for me, so it's enlightening on personal as well as academic levels. I hope that anyone reading this has learned something as well.

These are some final thoughts I have on the project as a whole.

I started out with journal entries in a Microsoft Word document which were completely reflective and personal in nature. I eventually began to intermix these entries with more academic reflections, and, as the project moved forward, the personal reflections turning into reflections on process and eventually dwindled to nothing as the momentum of the academic side picked up and took over the project. I am glad that I undertook this form for the thesis because it demonstrates my creative process to me, which is something of which I've always been aware, but have never been able to watch across the stages of a project's development. I also think that this format worked best for the subject matter, since it allowed me to make the project personal and to get the most out of my investigation that I could.

I wasn't ever sure where the project was going, which was frightening, but also liberating in a sense. I've enjoyed being able to write on whatever caught my attention that day, and I am delighted if some kind of unity has been established between the myriad pieces I've put down. I found my unity, so what remains to be seen is whether or not my attempt at an "authentic" writing style communicated that unity or if, like for the characters, the authentic method only results in scattered "facts."

I'm not sure if I'm finished with this project or not. There is a lot more research I would like  to do, for instance, but I've created a product, and, like Revel, my train is leaving town (my thesis draft is due today). So, for now, this is it. Thanks for taking this journey with me.

Library, Hamilton College, NY - 2 a.m., 1 April 2013.

April 1, Post 15

I think it's time to address the second problem I identified as part of the autobiographical act: the problem of inclusion. I've thrown this term around a lot, but I'm not sure I ever said exactly what it meant, though I'm sure my intelligent readers will have understood from the context. What I mean is that, as autobiography is a fiction representing an individual's life, autobiography necessarily includes certain events and excludes others according to some criteria of importance or impact in the individual's life. What is unclear is what these criteria might be, and whether they are the same for everyone in the world, for everyone in a given culture, or for no one.

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.