Playing within the discipline : dynamics of authorship in three Canadian autobiographies
Date
1995
Authors
Budd, Adam Russell
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Abstract
This thesis evaluates several approaches to three "autobiographies": Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse, and Kristjana Gunnars' The Prowler. The thesis argues for an appreciation of the range of tropological play in a text by reading each work through a generic framework that moves beyond Philippe Lejeune's theory of the "autobiographical pact." In contrast to Lejeune, who suggests that readers merely respond to the text they read, this thesis proposes that critics of autobiography might derive a more interesting analysis by recognizing the negotiation of meaning, as it is produced between readers and texts.
Given the instability of literary signifiers and their problematic link to a world beyond the text, the first chapter attempts to reconcile the significance of a "monologic" narrative, Ondaatje's Running in the Family. As the writer names himself after Ondaatje, and suggests that his narrative represents the author, ironically, the text shows the dialogical relationship of narrative to history while it denies a dialogical play among the text's tropes. The thesis challenges most interpretations of Ondaatje' s work by arguing that the text offers little direct representation of any voices other than the speaker's own, and that the speaker resists self-reflexive meditations by keeping a careful control over the anecdotes that at first seem to elicit a spontaneous response from him.
The second chapter looks at the contradictions in Memoirs of Montparnasse. The author opens his memoir by promising his readers that the text is a veracious representation of historical events. However, as the text develops, it becomes clear that the Glassco of 1970 is at odds with the text's characterization of him as the memoirist who claims to have written the text proper in 1932. Consistent with Lejeune's view, Memoirs marks itself as an autobiography through its naming of its author as the narrator/ memoirist. However, when we examine the tenuous relationship between the text's author and narrator, we appreciate the range of play each persona exhibits. The text at first seems to occupy a stable generic position as "memoir," only to refute that position and question the logic of Lejeune's theory when it turns its back on verisimilitude.
What happens when a text's narrator bears only a vague connection to the author who claims to have composed the work? The third chapter addresses Kristjana Gunnars' "novel" The Prowler, showing how a narrative structure reproduces the implied reader's attempt to locate a stable referent embedded in the text. The narrator is passionately committed to a reclaiming of her painful childhood through writing, yet the self-consciousness the project demands forces her, and her reader, to deconstruct the authority a present self wields over a past self when it is only the present voice that speaks (i.e., writes). This strategy, which questions relentlessly the role of the writer, encourages the reader also to question the "effect" reading has on her or his self-image. The author figure in The Prowler, then, is eternally elusive. No single persona can claim responsibility for the literary construction of that text.