A totem of narrators : the autobiographical voices of Emily Carr
Date
1993
Authors
Pickard, Richard William
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Abstract
The two main areas of debate in autobiographical theory revolve around the problem of truth -- especially the relevance of facts to autobiography -- and around the notion of the self. Emily Carr's published books, especially Klee Wyck, The Book of Small, and Growing Pains, offer a unique window onto both these issues. Carr's biographers have demonstrated her divergence from objective reporting of factual information; it is the purpose of this thesis to link this divergence to the success of Carr's autobiographic code, and simultaneously to relate it to Carr's evolving notion of selfhood, as revealed in her paintings as well as in her autobiographies.
Carr's own concept of autobiography changed as her writing career progressed. Generally, her books reveal a shift from a unified self toward a multivocal, plural self. In Klee Wyck, the narrator's position is essentially static; although events recounted in the book are separated by up to fifty years, there is no sense that the narrator relives that development. The voice in each chapter remains the same. The unified self dominates Klee Wyck through its location in the position of narrator. For comparison, Carr's Post-Impressionist works break from her earlier realism in a conventionally Post-Impressionist fashion; the nature depicted in them is just as "conventional" as Klee Wyck's sense of self.
The Book of Small is a different case, because there are at least two narrators in the book, possibly three. In a sense, though, this book only hints at moving beyond the unified self, because it deliberately obscures the use of distinctive voices. So complete is the intermingling of narrative voices that the use of different names or Emily and her sisters -- Small, Middle, Bigger or Emily, Alice, Lizzie -- provides the only clue to the existence of disparate narrators; all typical speech patterns and descriptive idiosyncrasies are apparent in all chapters. These intermingled voices can be linked to what Doris Shadbolt refers to as "interweaving planes" in Carr's first great forest interiors (70), those of 1927 to 1931; the apparently interlaced trees actually represent an indivisible forest, not trees as such.
Growing Pains, Carr's posthumously published book bearing the title-page designation An Autobiography, moves nearer the dissolution of the falsely unified self than does The Book of Small. Dissimilar narrators fill this book; Small, Klee Wyck, Miss Carr the Artist, young Emily, and many other selves participate in an increasingly multivocal text. Carr's late paintings depict natural objects as similarly multivalent beings, movement sweeping through individual figures to express the totality of the scene; here, though, individual components are not subsumed into the single scene.
However, the autobiography, as Philippe Lejeune recognizes, is tied to the single name of the autobiographer. Lejeune asserts that autobiography exists primarily by virtue of "the autobiographical pact," or "the affirmation in the text of this identity [of author and protagonist], referring back in the final analysis to the name of the author on the cover" ("Pact" 14). Barthes' notion of the death of the author is, for Lejeune, beside the point; of course there is no author within the text, but the author is at the same time
"not a person. He is a person who writes and publishes. Straddling the world-beyond-the-text and the text, he is the connection between the two." (11)
The autobiographer, while not fully recreated by or in the text, is however present in his or her component selves; Carr herself does not exist within Growing Pains, but her many voices and self-perceptions to combine to evoke the autobiographer, a thoroughly modern fragmented but whole self.
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UN SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions